Sunny with a chance of winter

Today I can feel the first gusts of winter, flush with cold, though I’m sure that it’s a meager herald of the coming ice age. I’m a rain-baby, you see, born and having lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, I know fancy words like “rainshadow” and I’m used to more green than white, even in the winter. Granted I spent quite a bit of my youth in eastern Washington, where there is a real winter, including temperates well below zero and snow up to your belly-button, at times. But it’s been awhile since then and from what I’ve been told the winter here will be make eastern Washington seem a tropical paradise. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Tomorrow marks the end of my first two weeks of classes. They’ve been going well so far. My classmates are – so far in my experience without exception – intelligent and interesting people, and though I wouldn’t say that I’ve made any “fast friends”, I’ve made some nice connections and shared some good conversations and conspiratorial smiles. We’re all in this together, after all, for the next two years, which means plenty of time to conspire, work, and share this experience called grad school.

The GLIS at McGill is modeled to resemble real-life work in a lot of ways. It’s considered a professional degree, so the studies rest much more on the practical than the theoretical, which I think is reasonable and very useful. The graded work in most of my classes is based almost entirely on group projects. Much as a real work environment, you have a project, people to work with (or you work on your own), and a completion date. Much as a real work environment, you generally have multiple ongoing projects at the same time, and you have to schedule the projects around other aspects of the job, in this case lectures and labs (which one could equate at work to time at the reference desk, or cataloguing, or other daily tasks). This is a good model for me because even though I’ve gotten much better at working in groups over the last couple years than I used to be, I consider it an essential part of effective library practice and it remains an area where I feel like I could still grow and learn. Working with people is always the most difficult, and most rewarding, part of the job.

I have some exams as well, and term tests, and individual projects to work on. I have plenty to work on, indeed. I’m not too stressed. Yet. Give me a couple weeks.

I’m working on creating a bibliographic database with a partner in a program called InMagic. We create fields – author, title, keywords, etc – decide how we want these fields to be searchable – term search, word search, both, or neither – and then enter records using the field information. We also have to identify our purpose and audience, and pick a subject, which for us is French Poetry. So far it’s been the most daunting of the projects assigned, though hopefully once we put some elbow grease into it then it won’t seem so insurmountable. For the moment, I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it.

Other projects involve creating a diagram describing how information flows within a library, which I’m working with two other people on, as well as creating original card- and MARC-format descriptive bibliographies for three books and comparing my records to records for the same books entered in other libraries. Like I said, I’m quite busy.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my Flickr photos (I added some new ones on Sunday and now there is a link over to the right), and check back here when you can. I’m going to make an effort, now that my life here in Montreal is solidly underway, to be more bloggerish. No, really!