Tapering

Doc Martens has some great advice for comps-takers, including the idea of tapering. As mentioned yesterday, my lack of energy early in the week had pretty much forced me to taper, but today I’m beginning to feel an upswing.

Last night’s two-hour America’s Got Talent binge probably helped. If you aren’t the sort who can sit still when you’re stressed out, try shelling pecans while you watch. I ended up with a packed-full large peanut butter jar of yummy pecan goodness.

So today I’ll do a little reading this morning, but nothing in the afternoon. This evening I’ll get packed up* and probably work a puzzle or do something that doesn’t involve looking at a screen, then tomorrow morning a wee bit more reading. After lunch I’ll drive to Norman and get checked in to the hotel, then go for a swim and surf the intertubes until it’s time for dinner with my study partner, M. We’ll probably talk comps a bit, but mostly from a pep-rally point of view. And then it’s early to bed, because I know I’ll be early to rise!

*What does one wear to comps? The computer lab tends to be a bit chilly, so layers are in order, but otherwise? Comfortable is good, but sloppy isn’t. Might pack a couple of options, just in case I wake up in a particular mood on Friday.

 

Current events: miscellaneous

Just continuing to assist my recall by jotting down various what-nots:

1. The Oregon Legislative Counsel will not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutues (I talked about this previously here). Although I haven’t had time to watch the videos and so don’t know the particulars of the hearing, I’m not surprised by the outcome. Full paper trail can be found here.
2. Infrastructure damage at the University of Iowa might be greater than first thought. In terms of disaster planning, know where your infrastructure is located! Underground will have different repercussions than above-ground.
3. An argument for closed stacks and lots of security, but also for having smart, on-the-ball librarians. So far law enforcement has confirmed that this guy stole 338 books from 51 libraries in the US and Canada. Another 500 or so are suspected as stolen.

 

A non-practical comps post

Do you ever, when you’ve got something big looming on the horizon, try to distract yourself by finding other things on which to concentrate? It’s a favourite tactic of mine, and one at which I’ve had a little help lately.

See, this Friday (as in the 27th of June, as in three days from now) I will be taking the final, comprehensive exam for my masters degree. On a purely intellectual level, it really isn’t that big a deal. Three essays in four hours? No problem. I’ve written simillar tests before (the advantage of having been an English major) and have been studying not just hard, but smart: organized, methodical. Slow and steady wins the race, and I’ve been shoring up my personal angle of repose ever since the beginning of May.

But then last week arrived and things just went wonky. Fathers’ Day and my birthday — both of which were lovely — a very close friend in need of a shoulder, and a job interview all conspired to add up to some added stress and a messed-up sleep schedule.

I had thought I’d recover fairly quickly, but I haven’t been able to get back onto a good sleep schedule and yesterday was fuzzy-brained all day long. Maybe all the nerves and energy I’d been saving for comps went into the job interview. Maybe this is my brain’s attempt at keeping me from cramming these last few days. Maybe it’ll all be fine by Friday morning.

No matter how many people tell me that I’ll do fine — and I do appreciate each and every one of them, because it’s awfully nice to hear — there’s a part of me that is prepared to fail. That probably sounds deafeatist, but the truth is that I’ve failed before. Life doesn’t turn out the way we plan: graduate school’s a disaster because we’re too young and naive to know what we’re getting into; a place we love isn’t destined to be the place in which we live; jobs that seem perfect simply aren’t.

So I have a plan ready in the event I need to take comps again next semester. I know what class I’d take and I’ve got a rough study outline drawn up. Just in case. Because I’d rather have that plan ready and not needed, than needed and not in place.

Anyway, this is turning into a rather gloomy post, which wasn’t my intent. It’s also rather misleading because I know I know this stuff. Everything I need to do well on comps is already tucked away in my head, so what actually needs to happen is to get rid of the feeling that I might be missing something by not reading just one more article (wafer-thin, of course). Any reading I do at this point is more to keep my mind sharp than to learn something new.

(cross-posted at my other blog)

 

Comps study meeting, week 6

This was a shorter meeting than the prior ones, largely because we were both feeling pretty confident — though this still means we talked for two hours. We covered the current events I posted about last week plus a few others, including all the flooding in Iowa and how it pertains to distater preparedness (unfortunately, the Cedar Rapids public library’s experience makes a very good example on this topic).

For this week we both have a few things we want to review, plus we’ll keep on top of current stuff. Even if there’s no question on a particular current event, I find that the contexts help solidify otherwise disparate concepts, plus they might come in handy as supporting points.

 

For J

Last weekend my friend J — who is currently *gasp* without email — and I were discussing whether or not academia is inherently gender-biased. She argued that it is, while I took my usual “it depends” stance. Most of her academic experience has been at the big research universities, while most of mine has been at small regional and liberal arts schools.

Looks like our experience was coloring our opinions for good reason:

men and women are being hired at four-year colleges at comparable salaries as they start their faculty careers, but there is one significant exception: research universities. At research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline and numbers of papers published and other factors, there is an unexplained 9 percent salary gap that favors men. (article)

 

I wonder…

what the SLIS faculty would think if all the students taking comps wrote This is Sparta! in the middle of one of their essays. (see story here)

 

Current events: copyright and speech

Three big stories today:

1. Blackboard is claiming that the recent changes made by Desire 2 Learn are not enough to keep it from being in contempt of February’s copyright infringement ruling (story on Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle).
2. The University of Michigan Press will no longer distribute books from the British publisher of the pro-Palestinian book that got so much attention last fall (story on Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle).
3. Remember the libel lawsuit filed against Cornell for removal of a digitized newspaper article? It’s been dismissed.

Also, a fine example of why I love freedom of speech: Gore Vidal at his pissy, crotchety best.

 

Current events: publishing

There’s been a little upswing lately in publish-related stuff coming across my radar. On Friday there was both a story on Morning Edition about publishers wanting to quit doing returns and a post on the Harvard Business Publishing blog advocates a new business model for publishers.

Yesterday there were two more items to note: A blog post on what happens to book identifiers when everything is digital (with a brief mention of fair use and licensing), and a NYT article on Amazon’s tactics for dealing with publishers who protest their terms.

On a related note, last night I read the chapter on publishing in my collection development textbook and while most of it was fine, a few things just weren’t quite right:

• Very little mention of the impact of print run size on the cost of books, except in the context of small publishers, but even large publishers will produce titles with small print runs. For example, a college textbook publisher might do so for a book aimed at graduate students or those in a highly specialized field. This is why books that are physically quite small can have very large price tags.
• The authors claim that mass market paperbacks are only reprints of titles previously published in hardback. Not true! Science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and romance titles — especially those by new or emerging authors — are often originally published in mass market format.
• “Small presses also can produce books more quickly than their larger counterparts.” Ummm…maybe in some cases, though not in my experience. Granted I’m not sure what their cut-off is for defining “small”, but as a book buyer I dealt with several mom-and-pop type publishers who were constantly pushing back publication dates.
• No mention that “annual lists” are very frequently referred to as “front lists”. A minor point, but something that could potentially confuse those new to publishing.
• No mention of how discounts work beyond a few passing references and the item “discount to retailer” in their break-down of a book’s suggested retail price. And that discount is figured at 50%, which isn’t necessarily typical. Discounts vary greatly depending on the publisher, the type of book,  and the size of the order. Technical, scientific, and textbooks tend to be short discount, meaning  about 15-25%, while trade books (fiction, biography, popular history, etc.) are generally 40-45% for individual titles and as much as 55-60% for larger orders. Some publishers give higher discounts on children’s books. All collection development librarians should be aware of the discount schedules for the major publishers in their subject areas so that they can intelligently build their orders.

 

Current events: Evergreen

On the fourth of this month, the University of Prince Edward Island’s Robertson Library became the first academic library to go live with Evergreen, the open source ILS.

Mark Leggott, the library’s director, has been blogging their quick implementation of Evergreen: post 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 (5 and 6 will be up later). There’s also a related wiki with activities and timeline. For those of us who have never been involved in an ILS migration, this is a very interesting glimpse into the issues involved.

 

Comps study meeting, week 5

This week we intended to cover the Research Methods class, but very few past questions actually touched on the more academic aspects (research design and the IRB, for example) that we concentrated on in LIS 5713 and instead focused on more day-in-the-life sorts of things (such as how to do a community profile) that were the whole focus of last semester’s class in assessment and evaluation. But that was a brand new class, which leads me to think that perhaps the usual research methods instructor (who was on sabbatical the semester I took the class) might have covered the more practice-oriented research a bit more than my instructor.

Anyway, we did talk about research methods a little but ended up spending most of our time parsing the old questions and determining how we would have answered them. This ended up being a very interesting exercise, in part because M works in an archive and so has a different perspective. But it was also interesting because such close perusal made me realize a few things:

1. Whether or not some of them are deliberately written to be misleading, you will certainly head off in the wrong direction without carefully reading and considering the point of the question; and
2. Despite the prevalence of questions related to social networking, I’m not convinced that all of our faculty are aware of what the term means. Why else would email be used as an example of social networking technology?

We also determined what we’re going to cover next week: information theories (since we didn’t really do them justice last week) and current events. Yes, we’ve chatted about current events a bit every time we meet, but we want to do a more thorough review.

And just in case you think that we’re nothing but nose-to-grindstone for the whole three hours, here’s a sampling of other things we chatted about: differences in blogging platforms (particularly WordPress and Xanga); dystopian fiction (Jennifer Government); job hunting (Echo Services, Inc.); Esther Williams’ swimsuits; and the Millennium Development Goals. After all, there’s no telling what might show up on comps.