The End is Not the End

Well here we are. Some of you are already done with your coursework for this class and others are still working on your portfolios and what not. I'm very happy to say that I finished up my portfolio a few days ago and furthermore, I also submitted my final paper for LIS 2000 this morning, too. Thus, I'm done with the semester. I'm a little bit worried that I still haven't received my grade for Assignments 7 and 8 (and for that matter, the group presentation we did on-campus for LIS 2000), so I don't feel like it's quite over. Even when I'm done with my work, there's still more to do (like write this blog). I don't mind too much, though. I guess that's the nature of being in grad school. Once this semester ends, we can sit back and relax for a month, but I know that in September it'll all start back up again. Frankly, I'm worried about how I'm gonna balance everything, especially with the the Retrieval half of LIS 2005 (which is now LIS 2002, I think) being called "search and seize hell" by at least one other blogger on here. Then again, I think all of us should be proud of ourselves. We all have busy lives and lots of responsibilities and this isn't easy.

As for the final assignment, well there's not too much to say about it (for a change). That's because it's just a portfolio of all the work we've already done. I'll say that the hardest part about it was figuring out how to present the ePrints articles and doing the screen capture, saving and then embedding the code and what not. Overall, though, I'm glad that it didn't take an inordinate amount of time, though. I know my site probably doesn't look that great (thanks to those who disagree), but I'm no programmer/web designer (to say the least). I guess the functionality is the most important part.

Well, unless I feel like posting something else on here this coming week, I'll see you all in the fall! I hope you enjoyed reading this thing as much as I enjoyed making it.

Thoreau, part deux

Well, once again I put off Assignment 8 until its due date (this past Sunday), though fortunately I was able to finish it a few hours later. Between the time I started to look at it and its conclusion, though, I definitely panicked and if it wasn't for the help of Tim Schlak and others on the message board (and particularly Amiya Hutson as well), I'd still be lost. Furthermore, in a fit of panic, I called a few classmates to see if they had any hints for me. I got their respective voicemails, but each of them called me back (again, within a few hours). Thus, thanks to everyone who commented on the board and to those who offered to help as well.

The first part of the assignment was easy, or so I thought at first. All I had to do was make 10 annotated hyperlinks. To be honest, I'm STILL confused about what exactly the annotations were supposed to be like and the instructions in the syllabus for this assignment certainly didn't illuminate it. Furthermore, even after receiving more specific instructions on the message board, I was still confused. At some point, I just left it alone, but I'll get to that part later. The first part was simple enough. This time, I used Amaya (which looking back on it, was a mistake) instead of Kompozer and frankly, I don't like it at all. After opening up my fragment and putting together 10 hyperlinks, I was confused about what do next. I just couldn't grasp the CSS concept as well as that of external styling. Thus, I started a thread on the message board and asked for help. Within a few hours, I got several responses and they were each very helpful. Thanks again to Amiya for pointing me in the right direction and to Tim for the detailed help. I realized that all I had to was insert the amended example.css file into my html and that would change the background of the fragment depending upon its specifications. Pretty easy, right? Well, I certainly calmed down after I realized this.

I did my work mostly in Notepad and it wasn't even too hard to find the appropriate part of the code to modify. Frankly, I didn't even need Amaya after modifying the code and then opening it up in IE (which I really dislike, but it's the default browser that opens an html file on the laptop I was using)to make sure that my changes were working. Well, I take that back, but only a little. I did need an editor to change around the last paragraph (which for some reason didn't have some necessary spaces between words). Again, it was easier to do it in Kompozer, though, which is so much more straightforward than Amaya (for me, at least). I didn't even need to code. I made those changes in the GUI screen.

So after I did that main part, I was still confused about the annotations and wanted to make sure that my hyperlinks were enough. Therefore, after putting it up on the Unix server, I posted another message on the board with the link, he said it was OK. I hope so, especially since we haven't gotten our grades for Assignment 7 yet.

Thoreau, part 1

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent part of Sunday night working on this assignment for LIS 2600. I wish that I didn't have to put off this assignment until the last minute, but fortunately it only took me about an hour to complete. The instructions were quite vague and since I have the syllabus printed out, I didn't realize there was a hyperlink embedded in there until I went to the actual syllabus on Blackboard and found the necessary fragment there.

Anyhow, after reading the discussion board, I realized that instead of going to the address specified, I had to download Filezilla first and then type in that address as well as the port before uploading my work there. To be completely honest, I'm still not completely sure that I did this correctly. As of yesterday, I still haven't received a grade on this assignment. Yes, I was able to see my work (following another really useful link in the Discussion Board which pointed to someone else's work on this assignment) and hopefully, our instructors can see it, too. I almost posted the link to the dB just to prove that it worked. I did get that infamous 404 (or was it 403?) error the first time I tried to view it and I'm still not exactly sure why. That was OK, though, because I realized that I didn't do the assignment correctly the first time around and so I had to edit it (I used KompoZer, which I found much, much more user-friendly for a relative HTML novice like myself than Amaya). Anyway, fortunately I didn't even have to use any coding. I just edited the fragment in GUI mode (the default mode when the program opens), saved it as an HTML file and uploaded to Filezilla.

As a side note, I'm glad that I didn't post it to Google as some of the other students did. I know that Dr. Tomer won't penalize any of us since he initially said that it was OK, but it seems like those who used it will have more work on their hands for this week. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I almost ended up using it before figuring out that I could just download Filezilla and then upload my document there.

I just hope that this week's assignment (which I haven't started yet) will be as (relatively) painless. It seems like a continuation of last week's work with some added hyperlinks and formatting, but I don't wanna judge it until I do it. Onward!

Fast Track Weekend/On Campus Learning Experience (Part 2)

Well Monday morning was the first "real" day of this whole thing. I walked down to campus (a fun and brisk walk since it's all downhill on Bigelow; I can't say the same for the walks back uphill, but at least it's good exercise), got great coffee from Crazy Mocha and an OK breakfast sandwich from Bruegger's Bagels and schlepped up to Allen. After Sunday, me and Jenny had both decided that it would be ludicrous to drive there given how close each of our hotels were to campus. And besides, we both like walking. Anyway, after getting our pictures taken and after the LIS 2600 presentation by Dr. Tomer, we got to have lunch on our own. I am thankful to Dr. Alman for many reasons, but one of them is listing Food for Thought in her "places to eat in Oakland" guide. This place makes a seriously great corned beef sandwich. "Really good" is an understatement. Do not miss this place if you're in Pittsburgh and into that sort of thing. Afterwards, I dragged Ian B. (who also accompanied me for lunch) to Wicked Discs, one of the record stores on S. Craig St.(one of the shopping strips in Oakland), where in the limited amount of time we had to browse there, I got a vinyl copy of Government Issue's You Lp. Overall, the store was small and cool, though a bit pricey.



After hustling back to Allen and getting in a few minutes late (sorry), we got to attend the "Introduction to the Profession" seminar. I must say that I really enjoyed this part of the learning experience and I think I learned quite a lot from the librarians in various fields. I think I've decided that I'd like to at least take the Introduction to Archives class as an elective, though I don't think I can commit to the entire track. I don't wanna place all of my eggs in one basket, especially not before I try out of the classes. I also think that school librarianship is probably not for me, though Joe Prince had what was by far the most memorable presentation due to Hamburgheruesa (I hope I'm spelling that correctly), a toy llama that he uses in his library at North Allegheny Middle School that even has its own e-mail address (I distinctly remember hamburgheruesarules@gmail.com). Although it's not my field of interest, Joe seems tailor-made for it (as a former English teacher) and he knows how to market his library and the profession itself quite effectively. Amy Watson's presentation interested me as well and later, I found out that we have a mutual friend who works for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in lower Manhattan. As she said, the world of libraries is quite small! And I don't think anyone in Cohort 9 will forget Barbara Epstein's presentation. I don't wanna mention it because it's so grizzly, but it's certainly memorable! Of the different tracks, I can see myself in academic, public, special libraries and maybe archiving as well and all for different reasons. It's tough to decide so early on, especially with only a little bit of experience (all volunteer) in my chosen field.

After our walk to SIS, we got to meet Elizabeth Mahoney and another member of the SIS faculty along with several library employees. I wasn't sure where to go for dinner afterwards and eventually settled on Ali Baba's on S. Craig St. It was pretty good, but not great. It was an absolutely gorgeous evening (slightly cool with virtually no humidity and mostly clear), so I found a bench somewhere on 5th Avenue and read Viral Spiral (an excellent book which may be my favorite of everything we've had to read for LIS 2000, but again more on that later). After that, I hoofed it back to the hotel, where I worked on my bullet points for the book discussion for Viral Spiral and Everything is Miscellaneous while somehow managing to watch the season premiere of No Reservations. I also worked on some stuff for our group presentation as well. Fortunately, we managed to finish most of the work for our group presentation before we arrived on campus, but there was still work to be done (annotated bibiliographies, et al.) along with, as ever, more reading before submitting my thoughts on our readings into Course Documents.

Fast Track Weekend/On Campus Learning Experience (Part 1)

Well I just back from Pittsburgh. OK that sounds like the start of an old song or something, but it's true. We (myself and Jenny Pilling, a student in my cohort who was kind enough to give me a ride there and back; thanks again!) drove out to Pittsburgh on Saturday from where she lives (Ardmore, which is right outside of Philadelphia) and got there in under 5 hours. It definitely helps to go on a Saturday, so we avoided all the traffic that way. We were also lucky enough to avoid the traffic on the way back on Wednesday, but more on that below. Now for the sake of not having this post be the equivalent of a lengthy Russian novel (are there short ones?), I'm separating them into different parts. The first segment will cover Saturday and Sunday.



After checking in to my hotel a little after 9 (after a great dinner at this place), I was too exhausted to really accomplish much of anything other than checking e-mail and watching Valley Girl on one of the movie channels before dozing off.

It was fortunate that we didn't have to be on campus until 1 since I had a chance to sleep in a little (though I did get up and 8 and managed to work out at my hotel's gym; it was the last time I was able to do that, but more on that later). What was unfortunate, though, was the hotel's complimentary breakfast. In this case, there was a reason it was complimentary and that's because (for the most part), it was awful! For the rest of my stay, I happily paid a few dollars extra for coffee and breakfast elsewhere. So anyway Jenny (who stayed at the Quality Inn; she told me later that it was half the price, so I think I know where I'm staying in October) came to get me at 11:30 so that we could go to campus to get our IDs. There was no line and we got our IDs within minutes and then we met up with Nicole, another student in our Cohort who came all the way from Qatar! We all went to the Primanti Brothers on Forbes Ave. in Oakland (a neighborhood I'd explore and get to know really well for having been there only 4-5 days), right next to the University, and I'm happy to say that it was great and way, way better than the one I went to 3 years ago in some suburb (the only time I'd been to the Pittsburgh area prior to my trip). So anyway we went to Allen Hall and met some of the other students. Eventually, just about everyone in our cohort arrived and we met Dr. Alman and Dr. Tomer as well. I think we just did some introductions and team-building exercises before having dinner at Lulu's Noodles (a place with seriously GREAT bubble tea and pretty good Chinese food, too), but then again I'm still so wired from the experience that sometimes it's hard to keep what happened on which particular day straight. After dinner, I went back to the hotel to work on my project for LIS 2600. Yes, I did put it off until the last minute, but fortunately it didn't take me long to get through it. That'll be a separate blog post, so stay tuned for that.

Koha assignment

Well, I meant to post something about this earlier since I finished this assignment on Friday night, but a busy holiday weekend has prevented me from doing that until now. Like Karen, I really enjoyed doing this assignment because I essentially got to catalog some books on my favorite subject (music). When I created my folder, I didn't label it as such (calling it "Matt B"). However, I would hope that our teachers get the general idea and given that the name of the class blog is evocative of The Basement Tapes (a series of recordings by Bob Dylan and The Band done in the mid '60s), I have very little doubt that they would.

In any case, I did run into several snags with it. First off, it was a little annoying that like what Professor Schlak (Tim) said, I got about a 50/50 hit-to-miss ratio with the ISBN search. I was never sure whether to use the 10 or 13 number ISBN. Sometimes I tried both and got one (but not the other) and sometimes I got neither. Sometimes I typed in the title or the author and found the book I wanted to catalog that way. At other points, I was surprised when searches for famous authors like Nick Hornby (as well as searching by the titles of his books) turned up absolutely nothing, but yet books by far lesser known authors (Brendan Halpin, for example) came up (not that I'm complaining about that, mind you). At first, I didn't realize that all of the items have to be about a specific subject because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough. It's a good thing that I looked at the other folders to get a general idea! Thus, I had to delete about 4-5 books that weren't specifically music-related, so that was a bit annoying but not a huge deal.

What was a bigger deal was that sometimes (though on only a few occasions, thankfully), I got that nasty error right after the step where I put in the extra bit of information in the 3rd box about it automatically filled in the missing item fields after downloading much of the needed information when it was found in the internet search (sorry I don't have Koha open now so I forgot the specific step). This was usually after it had been hanging for 4-5 minutes, too! All that waiting and for nothing! I figured that it was just a problem with Koha, though, because usually I was able to get it to work after 2-3 tries. If it still didn't work, I would just move on to another book and usually, that would work. Still, the assignment took a bit longer than it should have for that reason. Perhaps internal improvements to this step and to Koha in general are in order?

At first, I also didn't realize that I had to make my folder public, but that was easy enough to change. Well, now I have to finish some reading for LIS 2000 and to start on a paper for that class. In the words of a Government Issue album title, the fun just never ends!

Oh and before I forget, I wanted to say that Dr. Tomer's instructional video was absolutely invaluable in terms of helping me to complete this assignment. Without it, I would've been totally lost. What helped me was pausing it as I was going along and cataloging my first item and after a few items, I didn't need to view it anymore.

My Crazy Life

Well, I just wanted to let you all that I got a new job earlier this week. I know what you all are thinking and no, I'm not asking for sympathy. Everyone in the program is busy, often to an insane degree. I am, however, feeling more than a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Today was my second day and to say the least, this month will be very busy for me. Thankfully, I'm off tomorrow and though we have a busy weekend ahead of us (including a wedding on Saturday; yep, our friends are getting married on the 4th), I think I should have enough time between tomorrow and Sunday to finish up my work for both this class and LIS 2000 as well.

And speaking of LIS 2000, I participated in my first Skype session today. It was a conference call to talk about the group presentation we have to do for that class during our on-campus session in Pittsburgh in a few weeks. I have to get a mic set up to be able to participate fully in the next session, but it was still cool to use it for the first time. When I downloaded Skype (which was a bear to download, BTW; I had to download the full version since the original executable file I downloaded didn't work and then I had to change the extension to .exe to get it to open, but hey it worked), I also unwittingly downloaded Google Chrome, which I'm using for the first time tonight. I really like it a lot so far. I don't know if it'll eventually replace Firefox (I can't stand IE) as my default browser, but so far so good. It seems very intuitive and easy to use.

Also, back to 2600, when do you all think we'll get our grades for the last few assignments?

ePrints

Well, I finally finished the ePrints assignment last night. After looking at the dB, I figured it out, though like many other students it seemed like the hardest part of it was knowing where to begin. At first, I wasn't even sure if I had to download it until I read the dB! In any case, uploading some of the large .pdf files was definitely the most time-consuming part of it along with having to switch from IE (to access the VPN) back to Firefox, my regular browser. That wasn't such a big deal, though. I also mistakenly forgot to save some of the information I found for the citations in a text file, so I just decided to type in the entire abstacts instead of going into the VPN again for some of the entries. Again, I hope I get all the metadata that I needed to, though it doesn't seem as important (from what I read on the dB, at least) as getting 25 articles into the live archive. I also didn't provide URLs for the article. I figured the .pdfs were sufficient. I hope this is OK, too, and that I don't get points off.

And speaking of which, I'm wondering when we'll get our grades for the Jing/Zotero assignment. OK, enough ranting.

belated thoughts on Jing/Zotero assignment

When I first attempted to do the assignment, I realized that I'd never made an audio recording using a computer. I thought for sure that I'd have to purchase a microphone or a webcam, but luckily the laptop I was using during the time where we didn't have an internet connection via our desktops (a big storm a few weeks back knocked out our phone service for 3 days and also knocked out our modem and we had to wait for Earthlink to ship us a new one) did the trick. I didn't realize that most of them had built-in mics, so thanks to the instructors for the tip!

I found that it was relatively easy to use Jing, both in terms of the capacity it has for enabling users to make videos and in terms of screen capture (though this was a bit trickier; I had to do it 3-4 times to get it right). Therefore, I found that the toughest part of this assignment was to put it on this blog. In particular, while it was easy to get the video up, the challenge was how to make it fit the screen properly. I experimented with a few different approaches and finally was able to curtail it so that it fit my laptop screen, albeit at the expense of screen clarity. It's too bad that Blogger doesn't resize it automatically, but it's easy enough to change the HTML code references to height and width (thanks for the tips). I ended up changing only 3 of the references to height and width and not all of them, but I still think that it did the trick (?).

Now it's full speed ahead onto the eprints assignment!

Assignment 4 (Zotero Installation Video)

I apologize for the scratchiness of my microphone, especially towards the end of the video, but this is the first time I've ever narrated an audio presentation and it's the only mic I have at the moment. Anyway, I hope you can understand me.

I also apologize that this out-of-scale. I tried resizing the height and width, but there's still a disconnect between the screen size and what it shows on blogger.

Assignment 4 blues

If anyone can help with the audio narrative portion, please get in touch!

How Am I Doing in this Course? Please Call 1-800-...

I do have one question that I've forgotten to address thus far, though. Dr. Tomer, if you're reading this, how will grades be assigned? Will they be posted at the end of the term or earlier? If I missed this in the syllabus or elsewhere, then I apologize. I was just wondering. Anyone else can answer this, too. Thanks in advance.

It's Oh So Quiet...

Since there have not been any assignments assigned for this week in LIS 2600, I haven't been posting here the post few days. Don't worry, though. Once I start working on the next assignment, I'm sure that I'll start ranting and rave here just like last weekend. In the meantime, though, I hope that everyone has a great weekend. Now it's off to the watch the Phillies take on the Nationals at Citizens' Bank Park and hopefully it won't be a rain-out.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Libraryboy, the blog I've created for LIS 2600, one of the two courses I am currently taking for my 1st semester in the Fast Track MLIS program via The University of Pittsburgh.

Those of you following me and reading this may already know who I am from the introductions on the main Fast Track Discussion Board or the Discussion Board for LIS 2000, the other course I'm currently enrolled in, so if the following is already familiar to you, I apologize in advance.

My name is Matt Berlyant. I'm one of those "career-changers," as my previous academic background is in Statistics and much of my previous work background has been in academia both as a staff member and as an adjunct math professor. I'm also married and live here in Philadelphia with my wife Anne and our cat Lola (otherwise known around here as "our pride and joy" and many, many other affectionate nicknames).

Based upon the instructions given, I'm not sure if I should stick to discussing topics pertinent to this course, but that's what I assume. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know for sure (if you have that information) or just to say hi (or for any other reason). I'd be happy to hear from you.

And yes, the lack of separation between the two words that make up this blog's title ("library" and "boy") is entirely intentional. It's an homage to Brendan Halpin's novel Donorboy. To be completely honest, I haven't read Donorboy yet (and probably won't read much for pleasure other than the daily paper and magazines and what not) for a few months given the insane amount of reading we all have to do for these courses, but I loved his novels Dear Catastrophe Waitress and Long Way Back. I loved DCW so much that I read it twice in a row from cover to cover, something I rarely do (after I read something once, I usually move on to something else).

You may have also noticed (if you click on the "about me" section and look at the all of my blogs) that I have another blog. It hasn't been updated in almost two and half years, but if you'd like to check it out, feel free. It mostly consists of music-oriented writing (show reviews and what not) written between December 2004 and December 2006, but also includes other observations on daily life and what not. After a year or so, I stopped updating it nearly as much because that was when I started writing for bigtakeover.com and thus most of my music writing since then has been on that site. You can read my posts over there @ the following URL:
My blog on The Big Takeover website.