I've been particularly enjoying working on the reference desk lately. The desk I've been working on since June is much, much busier than the one in the little branch library where I used to work, so although I'm only on the desk about 8 hours a week, I'm getting a whole heck of a lot more experience.
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This week's installment of Dykes To Watch Out For made me cry, dammit. Mo's had those cats forever, and I knew they were getting really old, but... wah.
If that made you sad, go get some baby panda therapy. Is there anything cuter than a baby panda? I can't think of anything.
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Like several other bloggers, I recently received copies of the textbook I'm now in (thanks to Emily). I am highly amused. Except if I had to answer the study questions, I suspect I'd flunk the class on my own poem.
It's fun being in a book full of mostly dead people though. That's a first for me. It's odd company to be keeping, for sure. Me and Emily Dickinson, we're like this.
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I am probably going to be submitting some of my published pomes to IUScholarWorks, a new digital "institutional repository." This is something a lot of universities are starting to do, generally coordinated by the libraries. It's one way of preserving scholarly & creative works digitally, giving them a permanent "address," and gathering together a bunch of the scholarly & creative output of a university in one easy-to-google location. We don't have a lot of content in ours yet, but if you look at the ones at Kansas and California, you can get a better idea of how this sort of thing works.
There is a "community" here for librarians & library staff, and we're starting out by just including works that have already been published. I double triple checked, and it really is ok with them if I stick a bunch of poems in, as long as they've been published and as long as the rights reverted to me upon publication. Cool. I want to convert them to pdf format first, so I'll get around to doing that shortly. I'll give y'all a link when they're in there.
Not that I have to worry about this anytime soon, if ever, but does anyone know whether book publishers would (hypothetically) have an issue with (hypothetically) publishing a manuscript that included poems already housed in an institutional repository? I'm thinking it wouldn't be a problem, since books always include poems that have been published in journals and anthologies. But if anyone suspects differently, let me know.
(Adding my documents to the repository doesn't involve relinquishing any of my rights -- I made sure of that.)
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Hanne Blank manages to put into words some of the things that have been bugging me about the Mark Foley story. The whole thing is such a nasty little brew of inappropriate behavior, downright sleaziness, homophobia, and political power games. Lately I've felt like I should wash my eyes out with soap every time I read the news.
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How in the hell is it October already? I had all these plans. I was going to get all this stuff done. Hmph.
2 comments:
Yeah, the DTWOF was sad, all right. (I thought comics were supposed to be *funny,* whine whine. Well anyway...)
The baby pandas are a major case of cute, however.
A webcam I like to drop in on now and then is a Penguin Cam at a scientific station in Antarctica.
It's a fairly modest site, features still photos that update frequently when the penguins are "in season," which should be soon, being the verge of spring in the Antarctic. Some of the site is in German though it also has English if you scroll a little. (The site doesn't update when it's winter there since the penguins are gone and it's dark most of the time.)
I empathize with the squirrels who are going crazy trying to get ready for winter. Yesterday afternoon I was out in the backyard, shoveling up turf as the rain poured down on my poncho-clad body, because I wanted to get the grass patch down before the little seedlings might freeze.
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