One KRUNK Librarian

VI on-site visit #1

Today is the second day of our first official "campus visit" weekend, and I really didn't know what [or who] to expect. What I encountered, though, was an energetic group of 15 people from all 3 islands who are otherwise referred to as the VI Cohort [6]. Thanks to the icebreakers by "Sympathetic Sue" (bka Dr. Alman), I even managed to learn everyone's name the first night (which, for me, is a major accomplishment).

And speaking of learning, I did some of that, too....actually, a lot of information exchange took place. Strangely now, all of the obscure posts in CourseWeb are beginning to make sense. For example, Dr. Tomer gave us the quick and dirty versions of: HTML vs XML, web editing using NVU, tag clouds, information obsolescence, DTD and other such relevant snippets that I'm recalling in random bursts since I haven't reviewed my notes yet. Oh yes, and I'm officially convinced--Firefox is da bomb (One less slave to the IE-driven Microsoft empire).

Dr. Alman also had us do an exercise to familiarize ourselves with professional library associations, of which there are a gazillion--literally. She stressed the importance of taking advantage of networking and other resources available through these organizations (for a nominal fee, since we are officially students.) My personal fave happens to be the MLA; not the Modern Language Association [infamous for bibliographic formats], but the Medical Library Association. For those of you who are also in the Medical Informatics track, this site should be at the TOP of your Connotea/del.icio.us lists! I found MLA to be an invaluable resource while writing my FastTrack application statements--everything I needed or wanted to know about the field was there: from trends/current issues to salary expectations to consumer/patron resources.

I was especially glad to learn the details about our tagging and bookmarking assignments. Since coming into this class was my introduction to tags, [social] bookmarking, and the like, I was just chugging along and cluelessly following instructions as best I could. But "Confused Chris" (that's Dr. Tomer to you) gave us a preview of what the end product would look like. All of the tags that we create for bookmarks will be integrated into a visual representation that will use text size/boldness to depict relative 'importance' (the more instances a tag is used, the more important it must be, the bolder the text of that particular tag). Behold--a tag cloud in all its splendor:





So, ummm yeah.... information science is kinda cool. ;o)

Oh yeah, and I'm taggin' some of my Cruzan colleagues: one is "courageous" and the other is "meritorious". :o)

posted by peculiar VIrtue @ 8:33 PM