David Gwynn

One of my big, pressing projects right now is to create an EAD-compliant finding aid for the papers of the man who was chancellor at UNCG when I was an undergraduate there. I’m not sure if I’m more disturbed by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history or by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history and that I’m the one documenting them. Either way, it’s nothing but a really big XML file anyway, I guess.

One of my other big, pressing projects is my exciting annotated bibliography on the history of the America shopping center. No, it’s not specifically related to Library and Information Studies per se, but at least it was more fun than most of the stuff I’ve been doing the past month or so. I’ll post it here when it’s done. There are pretty pictures and a nice history essay as well.

This may be the last you hear from me for the next couple of weeks.

You know what the coolest thing about working in a library is? When you need to go to the bathroom, there’s always a good book handy.

Latest addition to the ever-growing library at our house: the complete run of Progressive Architecture from 1953 to about 1990, and the complete Architectural Record from 1950 to 1969. These gems were picked up at the Forsyth County Public Library’s recent book sale, and I assure you we paid nowhere near $3000 for either set. The purchase required us to invest in four new six-foot bookshelves, bringing the total in our library to ten, plus four additional three-foot shelves in another room, for fiction.

Excessive? You be the judge. I have too much reading to do. I have to admit that it disturbs me to find that these items are still in the library’s online catalogue, even though they are very much in my house and likely to stay there.

Speaking of libraries (which I do a lot of lately), I start work tomorrow as a volunteer on a digitization project at the Greensboro Public Library. I’ll be scanning and cataloguing newspaper microfilm on the Greensboro sit-ins and other civil rights era stories. Should be interesting, and it will make nice resume fodder as well.

I sort of got the big geeky digital preservation bug tonight, and finally converted eleven-plus years of email — half of it in the old Eudora mailbox format — into the current Apple Mail format. It was harder than it sounds; this nifty little open source uttility was a big help. But now, I can read and search messages gong back to 1996, and they’re in what I believe to be a much more sustainable format.

Of course, such a project also meant I spent a little too much time reading old email. That’s always fun.

In case your inner geek is looking for some stimulation, note that the Eudora site above includes installers for some really old versions of that now-defunct email client for your amusement.

Since this article about the demise of film processing service in retail stores was mentioned today on both a superamarket board I follow and a library mailing list I subscribe to, I figured I was more or less required to link to it here.

My left arm hurts like hell, the result of a tetanus shot I had to have today in order to continue with school. Seems UNCG shredded my last set of immunization records ten years after I graduated (they keep them forever now, for all the good that does me) so I had to reach back into my childhood (and my mom’s files) to piece together what I could. I would’ve needed the tetanus booster anyway, but it’s still annoying.

That said, I’m in a better frame of mind than I was three days ago. I was just a little overwhelmed that I had so much going on all of a sudden. I knew it was temporary, but that didn’t help much. When much of your income is derived working for TV stations, September is a rather hectic time to be starting anything labor-intensive. And underneath it all, I suspect I was really freaked out at the looming due date of my first paper as a graduate student.

As is the case with so many other scary processes, I really just needed to dive in and get started on the damned thing, which I finally did today once most of my paid workload had calmed down a bit. I found a good chunk of supporting research (damn, there’s a lot of information available online when you have access to a major university library), made up my outline, and finally realized late this afternoon that I would probably get through this paper with no problem and might even do a passably good job on it.

The topic, for the masochists among you, is the effect of commercial search engine technologies on the value of the information acquired through them, and related implications for information professionals. Do I know how to have a fun weekend or what?

Random snapshots from my first week as a graduate student:

• What could be more annoying than slogging your way through a dense, 20-page treatise that atempts to determine the difference between “knowledge” and “information”? Maybe its conclusion that, in the end, it doesn’t matter anyway and that the terms will be used interchangeably throughout the entire text? Aaargh…
• An urban college campus makes for a nice “feel” but also for lousy parking.
• It’s nice having access to a university library again, particularly with a good chunk of it being available from home as well. Right now I’m amused by being able to download a century’s worth of articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post for free, but my current obsession is subject to change without notice.
• I hate group projects.

Endangered Durham is the kind of website I live for: the author is trying to document pretty much every piece of property in downtown Durham, over time and with vintage and current photos. This is the sort of obsessive mission the web is supposed to be all about, dang it.

After taking my first GRE practice test, I now realize that I am quite verbal, and need some quantitative review. Who didn’t see that coming?

Actually, I’m pretty math-minded as a general rule, but some of the more, ummm, obtuse concepts of geometry really tripped me up, mainly because I didn”t give a flying fuck about them in the ninth grade, and I pretty much still don’t. I find very few real life applications in my daily life. I’m surprisingly OK with much of the algebra, although I have a tendency to make stupid mistakes when I’m not paying enough attention.

Despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I guess you can go home again. Sort of. It’s just that everything looks much different.

I spent tonight in the same building where I spent much of 1982 through 1984, in the student union at UNCG. I was attending an information session for prospective graduate students, since I’m planning to get my MLIS. (And yes, that’s an announcement of sorts.) But there’s no resemblance whatsoever between the Elliott Center of my misspent youth and today’s version.

To start with, the building is about twice as big. It now has a food court and a Barnes & Noble, not to mention an entirely new auditorium. If that weren’t enough, though, they’ve also gutted the old part of the building. Nothing I remember is there anymore. No more radio station hallway where we used to play record frisbee with Survivor albums, no more Student Government office, no more lower level men’s room where I used to, ummm, never mind…

It’s disorienting as hell to be in a building where you’ve spent literally thousands of hours and not to be able to find your way around.