Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Originally posted in my space at LISNews (hey, why not - makes it look like I’m more active here!):

So, a year and a half ago I was sending in my grad school applications, complete with that “why I wanna get my <insert appropriate acronym - MLS, MSLIS, MSLS, etc. - here>” essay. I wrote about being something of a techie (math/cs in college, and subsequent employment as a Unix system administrator for several years before my current role as “information architect” [which doesn't conform exactly to what's described in the Polar Bear Book, but that may be a topic for later] ) with a strong desire to eventually move out of a corporate library setting “into an academic setting in which I can combine two desires: to continue applying technology to assist others in their information gathering and analysis, and to positively impact the education of younger generations by introducing them to the technologies and methods by which they, too, can learn how and where to find the information they need to know.”

I quickly decided to further postpone the move to a more academic role when I discovered that the School Media Specialist program at my Information School of choice (and probably at other schools as well?) left no room for selecting my own electives - a freedom I wasn’t yet willing to give up. I figured I could start building the foundation now, and at some point in the future back-fill with the education-related coursework.

Since last summer, I’ve discovered two things that are somewhat unsettling to me:

1. With practically every new course I take, my future goals - what I want to do with this degree - seem to change significantly (do I really want to go the school media specialist route? what about medical librarianship? or a different kind of special library? or maybe sticking with my current job description which will be bolstered by the more technical LIS offerings?)
2. With each course - and after each review of the course offerings - I grow increasingly more amazed that I can graduate with a mere 36 credit hours (12 courses) and call myself a degreed librarian … how can 12 classes be enough??

I’ll reach my half-way point in December, and with all but one or two of the core requirements under my belt, some of the more difficult decisions will need to be made: which electives to select to round out the rest of my degree, and which direction I want to take upon graduation. I can sympathize with Jenne’s situation (see posting from June 15) and found the comments there to be helpful. I guess the purpose of my ramblings here is to take her question(s) a little further:

• how frequently do folks with a Library/Information degree switch the types of libraries in which they work? I’m glad to know that many people probably change their minds during the course of school, but I wonder how many make changes after graduation and after working in a particular type?
• I tend to be a dabbler in lots, expert in little; is a broad-but-somewhat-shallow program really ok for most positions? Do many/most folks continue on to get advanced certificates in a more focused subject area?
• Related: outside of conferences, how often do degreed librarians take advantage of continuing education programs? For those that do, which is more of a driving force – the desire to keep learning, or the need to acquire new skills for a particular job?

Thanks for reading my ramblings, and thanks in advance for any insights, anecdotes, or “me too!”s that you all might have!

Ok, here’s a word to the wise: if you ever decide to post images to a web site, think carefully about the names you give to your image files, and to the links that point to those images. If you don’t, you could discover that your images are being found and used in the most unlikely ways.

For example, when Husband and I bought our house (wow, nearly 3 years ago), we had grand plans for all the work that we wanted to do (and that the house sorely needed). We also had grand plans for documenting this process, in the form of a joint weblog (http://www.muddle.org/fatidgies/ ). Several of the links on the site still don’t work (maintenance of the site isn’t high on the priority list currently). and while we have made a few improvements to the house since purchase, the only pictures currently available illustrate the state of things before the papers were actually officially signed and before we moved in.

Here’s the issue… we bought a fixer-upper (well, that’s not the exact issue, I’m getting to it in a bit). We’re quite willing to admit this, and when posting the original pictures I gave the files names such as “ugly-kitchen-sink” and the link name “Ugly Kitchen.” At the time, I didn’t give any thought to the fact that somehow these images might make it into Google’s searchable index of online images, and I certainly never dreamed that a search for ‘ugly kitchen’ would yield ours in the first slot (and yes, that picture in the second spot is from our house, too… tho I must stress that it was taken before any of our stuff was moved in!).

One of the benefits of running your own web server is having access to the server logs. One day this spring I decided to go poke around through the logs to see what search engines and other sites were accessing which pages at muddle.org .. to my surprise, I saw hits going to the fatidgies website, which was unusual since we hadn’t shared that URL with many people at all. Even stranger, I noticed that people were managing to find the fatidgie images via Google image searches using the string “ugly kitchen” - and some of these dear folks were actually linking to the pictures on their own web journals.

It’s this latter bit that leaves me feeling conflicted. While I recognize that one really shouldn’t post information on the Internet if it’s not meant to be found, I don’t particularly like the fact that some folks (scroll down to the June 21 entry) go as far as embedding my pictures in their own pages. They haven’t gone quite so far as to download the pictures to their own servers and pass them off entirely as their own (which would be worse, imo), but rather than linking to the pictures in text (and thereby giving credit where credit is due [which one might argue is not particularly desirable when it comes to our house, but that's not the point]) they include the image inline. Not only does this make the picture, at first glance, appear to belong to that site, it also impacts our web server because every time that page is loaded the image has to be downloaded from our machine. In our case, this isn’t a big deal because we currently don’t pay for bandwidth, but in the not-too-distant future this might not be the case. There are measures I could take to prevent this from happening, or to correct it when I find it (like what Medley did when she discovered that someone had done the same thing to her - she surreptitiously replaced the “stolen” image with a different one), but I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so at the moment - it’s one of those things where I want to rant about the problem but don’t like the idea of having to implement a “fix” or work-around for something that’s just plain wrong in the first place.