James Truitt (he/him)The weird thing about doing library school in a program based in Silicon Valley (SJSU) is that one is constantly confronted with the specter of undead technology.
Undead tech takes a couple forms đŸ§µ
Tempted to wrap up this whole section on research with "Without survey research, we never would have gotten the MPLP paper, and archivists might still be physically processing at the item or folder level today"
Restraining myself from ending my portfolio section on doing lit reviews by saying "Okay, but forget that, as a practicing professional you need to read blogs and talk to people"
Anyway, it keeps bugging me that the lists of metadata standards I keep encountering often include EAD but never DACS. Like, you put AACR2 on here but not MARC, so what gives?
I keep being assigned textbooks from the aughts and 2010s for my metadata class, and the lack of engagement with archival theory is really something. Like, no one is interested in archivists' work with aggregates, or questioning that description should be done at anything besides item level. Wild
I'm three weeks into this course and taking so much psychic damage from the prof
—> "HTML was designed to display data" (as opposed to XML, which was "designed to describe" it)
*looks at hubbub over semantic html*
One of my professors just said* that "many publishers use TEI" which… do they? As someone who did a bunch of TEI encoding in 2021, I did not get the sense that it was a particularly lively standard—but I'm no expert on the publishing industry
*via pre-recorded lecture
There's a strict word limit on this grad school final, and I don't think I've done this much greening since undergrad. Down to 450 words from 790, and it still says basically all the same things!
"The postpositivist tradition comes from 19th-century writers, such as Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Newton, and Locke"
2 of these things are not like the others, methodology textbook!
Epistemology-textbook-stops-getting-basic-facts-wrong challenge, 2k25
So far we have
- "The dark side of the moon is cold because it's always dark"
- "Everyone used to think the earth was flat"
- "Vitamin C prevents colds"
And half credit for "people speak Chinese in China", because there are so many different Chinese languages
(Not convinced that these aren't a set-up for some kind of reveal at the end of this intro chapter, though)