End of Year 1/Start of year 2

Hello,
I haven't really talked about my experience in library school recently, so I' thought I would take a moment and write a bit about my experience and my plans for the coming year. The last year was a pretty busy one for me. I took some great classes, met a bunch of cool people, and went to/started to plan a conference. I know I wrote a write up about my first term here is what's happened since then.

Spring Semester 2011:

This spring I took 3 classes:

• 768 - Problems in library and information agency administration
• 748 - Business information sources and services
• 707 - Introduction to information organization and retrieval

All of the classes required a fairly substantial time commitment for the assignments and they were all back loaded at the end of the quarter. The result was a stress free start, and a stressful end. By the end of the quarter I was sleeping 12 hours over 4 days. If you've never done this before I recommend not doing it. As a result of stress and lack of sleep I forgot my external hard drive in one of the labs and it vanished. Doing things ahead of time, and not stressing out is worth it intrinsically. But if that's not enough to help you beat your procrastination streak, just imagine how much it sucked to loose 5 years of your intellectual life.

Problems in library administration was definitely a great class. It was worth if for the discussion of budgets alone. We also discussed library advocacy in depth, and how to deal with restructuring as a result of budget cuts. While the Business reference had a really weird vibe the term I took it, it was a great class and gave me a lot of experience looking for and using business information to create reports and analysis. It will definitely be a knowledge base I will use in the future. 707 was a solid intro class. It had its own thing going on, but the course work was really fun. The tests though, were very hard.

Notes from the Frontline - An Example (Swedish)

Below is an example of what I have been working on. As my search for Science Fiction translated into English begins to slow down and reach completion (at least as close as I can get). I've been pulling entries from my database out into a Microsoft Word document and preparing my manuscript. I've chosen Swedish as my sample entry because it is brief but also high lights some of the features of my work. Where I have had comments about the general publishing trends in a particular language, I have noted them at the top before any entries. Where I am able to categories a collection I have included categories as well as an abstract. When the bibliography is complete I hope to have annotations for all entries as well as categories listed for every novel and as many of the collections and anthologies as possible.

Swedish

Scandinavian genera fiction has garnered significant attention as Steig Larson’s Millennial Trilogy has dominated the best seller list. There are several other well know mystery writer writing in Norwegian and Finnish as well. This attention has not as of yet translated into a publishing boom, however, Scandinavia has a thriving Science Fiction Community. Mikael Niemi, is one example of how Scandinavian authors are encountering Science Fiction and bending its tropes to their own creative will.