I've been silent for many weeks now, mainly because I had three rather large projects all due the same day (this past Friday). It was a good thing I did. Prior to those projects, I had felt very discouraged about library school. I felt that I was left to my own devices overmuch, that the lectures were less helpful and more about professorial idiosyncrasies. It took me a few weeks, but I realized that they have finally shown me enough resources that I can do this stuff myself. One can decide to learn, be eager to learn, but without tools that desire often becomes frustrated.

For example, I can now expound the difference between Dublin Core metadata encoding, and MARC encoding. I can tell you how Dublin Core fits into METS, sort of the updated version of MARC with many many fewer fields. I have actively found and developed an outline for the collection development policy for a special collection of web documents. And I remember all the stats stuff I once knew.

All this to say? Academia got me so down I forgot what my purpose was. This is utilitarian knowledge, but not in the bad, decried sense. This is knowledge that leads to reasoning that hopefully leads to showing people where and how to find the knowledge and truth they seek. And that means something.

Hopefully it means I've turned a corner, that from here on I will salvage an education meant strictly to be utilitarian. I've got some time to do it. On Wednesday, I return to NH for a brief engagment (ha ha, if ONLY). Hopefully I'll get some pictures up on here to share with all five of you who check in every once in a while