2015 – Library Science Begins

Watched the sun set
Took many walks and photos as the sun set on one of my last days before school began this year.

I’m officially a grad student trying to make my way to the finish line, which will then start a whole new race in the form of a career and possible location readjustment. Having lived in Hawaii my entire life (except the 10 months I was on the mainland for basic training and AIT), I’m restless for change. It feels like something I should do, whether I want to or not. But, I more want to, than don’t-want-to.

Library science is interesting and reminds me of business school in many ways as far as structure. My instructors this semester are great. The people are very nice overall.

I got a jobby job, working in the Pacific Collection as a digitizing specialist SA III. I like it so far and am learning a lot. Here is an example of something I did today: I resized an image into 4 different formats, FTP’d them to the server, logged into the CMS for the collection and updated all the required info fields, linked the images and hyperlinks to the online catalog and evols site, and viola! I made information accessible to the world at large! Happy. Awesome.
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/pacific/Pages/viewtext.php?s=browse&tid=312&route=browseby.php&by=newest&s=browse#

It is rewarding to do this kind of work, and a bonus is that I get to see some pretty amazing things. I read through some masters theses as I got them ready for upload into the system (currently they are only on microfilm and printed leaf paper). They were often so interesting… I wanted to read many of them all the way through, but that’s not what I am paid to do. I already feel smarter just by having read the parts I did of each paper. I made a summary for each paper that will be input into the system when they are uploaded and displayed on the web by the Desktop Network Services (DNS) staff at the library. You know what’s funny, is I’m probably qualified in many ways to serve on that staff having been a professional system administrator for application servers… but I’m avoiding it for now.

2015 is off to a good start! I’m thankful.

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