It’s COLD here! The past few days have been in the teens (Fahrenheit, for all you folks back home) and tomorrow night’s low is supposed to be below zero. The snow, which is blanketing everything now, is nice to view from inside a warm apartment.
Yesterday was my last day of classes for the semester. I have really enjoyed teaching about subject analysis and e-books. The students are bright and engaged; I, have learned so much about the topics of the classes; I’m really looking forward to when classes resume next term (teaching about RDA and an intro to metadata class). My students surprised me during the break between classes yesterday (I teach my two classes back-to-back, with about half of the students taking both classes). They walked in looking very sheepish, then finally one spoke up and thanked me for teaching such great classes. Two others spoke up similarly, then they handed me a gift bag with a souvenir picture book of Poland in it. I was really quite touched by the whole presentation. Many of them had just finished filling out an evaluation form in the previous class, but I told them that this was the best evaluation I could imagine. It was really quite sweet.
The last half of the e-books class, I diverged from the usual seminar format and gave a short presentation on the image of librarians in Hollywood movies. I showed them the scene from Citizen Kane where a severe-looking archivist with the requisite bun provides manuscript papers to a reporter; some scenes from Desk Set; the Marian the Librarian song from The Music Man (of course); and a short scene from Ghostbusters with an ethereal librarian, again with her hair in a bun and shushing. There were two other clips I showed (these are all on YouTube) that some of you may not be familiar with and which I recommend. One is Parker Posey in Party Girl, working as a paraprofessional and publicly deriding a library user for ignoring the Dewey Decimal System and replacing a book randomly on the shelf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbDdgWiaS0&list=PL1090749616C557CC
The other is Judy Garland in Strike Up the Band as a high school student who works in the school library. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zC2NcR3ajU The scene doesn’t have much to do with the library, but it’s worth watching her sing Roger Edens’ song “Nobody.” There are many cultural references in the song, some of which I had to look up to understand – I could imagine how little my students here would have understood had I not handed out a guide to the references. All in all, a fun way to end the semester. Now on to grading the piles of papers they handed in yesterday!
