Mary Bolin Introduction (now someone else please introduce themselves so I don't feel lonely)This blog is a place for Library Philosophy and Practice editors and editorial board members to exchange ideas and information.
Please tell us something about yourself, and post a photo of yourself if you like.
I'm the Chair of Technical Services at the University of Nebraska--Lincoln Libraries in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nebraska is my home. My mother and my three brothers also live here in Lincoln. I returned here three years ago after spending 17 years at the University of Idaho, which is a wonderful place. I'm happy to be back in Nebraska, but I still miss Idaho. My husband is a reference librarian at UNL. We have three kids: Charlie is 22, and lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he is working and pursuing landscape photography. Alice is 18 and a junior at UNL. Tom is 14 and a freshman in high school.
I'm writing my dissertation this year, in Educational Administration and Higher Education. My topic is a typology of librarian status at US public universities and a discourse analysis of librarian appointment documents. My research interests include discourse analysis, organizational communication, and the programmatic nature of academic libraries.
posted by Mary Bolin @ 5:09 PM
2 Comments:
I am Felix Chu. Currently, I am the Unit Coordinator for Cataloging. I was hired 22 years ago as Automation Librarian here at Western Illinois University. After three years and a new library director, my job was phased out and I moved to Reference. When Cataloging needed help a few years later, I started splitting my time between Cataloging and Reference. Then the Unit Coordinator for Cataloging retired, I took over Cataloging (and ILL). My first job out of library school was cataloging at UNL. So moving back to cataloging was not accidental.
As evident in my writings, my interests are not in the collection or technology, but what happens in between, particularly in how we librarians can help the process. In the social construction of reality, how do we fit into the construction process, whether as observers or active participants.
Something I just started thinking about a couple of days ago is whether the OPAC is getting too complex to be useful to most of our patrons. I, as a cataloger, embed access points into the cataloging record, and indirectly control access to our database. These access points may be hot links to fulltext databases, tables of contents, or biographical information on authors. But the ultimate question is how useful are these to our patrons? How steep is the learning curve to navigate among these choices? Or are these access points to benefit our perception of needs as librarians?
So now you know who I am, what I do, and my professional concerns.
Felix
Hi Felix,
I'm very interested in the social construction of reality. The schools and techniques of discourse analysis that I'm using for my dissertation have a close connection to that concept: discourse communities, the way ideology is embedded in discourse, etc.
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