Well, I just finished my third job for the day–this morning I worked at Barnes & Noble from 7-11am; then I had my first shift at the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1-4:45pm; then I finished up a batch of carrier additions for Lean Logistics after supper. Hopefully this will be the only day I put in that many shifts! I will be finishing up next week at Barnes & Noble, and start my regular schedule at the MHS on October 22nd. Everyone has been wonderful, and I am so excited to start in earnest (but grateful I will not be doing double-duty until then)!

I thought I would take a moment, before finishing the final draft of my Evaluation of Information Services evaluation proposal, to sit down and write a little bulletin about what I have been doing this week in library school (I am still on the fence about the whole am-I-an-archivist/am-I-a-librarian divide; I’m glad my new job title is “Library Assistant.”).

I knew I had arrived in library science school when I went out to Blick art supplies and purchased a dozen soft lead pencils and a pencil case this week. I need to take notes at my internship, and other various places where pens are highly discouraged, and I was always finding myself without the proper tools. I am very pleased, and may soon (my archivist-historian friends assure me) find myself preferring pencils above all other writing implements. I have not taken the next step, which would be to start taking “notes” using a laptop and digital camera.

I also know I am in grad school because I have become extremely forgetful. Since being offered the MHS job last week I have locked myself out of my room once, left my wallet at work, forgotten my T-pass for the subway, and (the crowning achievement) left my mobile phone in a cab on my way home from Barnes & Noble Sunday night . . . in my defense, it was 2am following music inventory, but still . . . the cab driver was kind enough to return it unscathed the following day on his rounds through the neighborhood.

This week in classes:

• In Evaluation of Information Services, we were testing our “evaluation tools” (social-science speak for surveys and data-collection exercises) designed to evaluate how well the library science school website works (verdict=not-so-well). After posting this, I have to go do the final draft of my group’s evaluation proposal, with the appended “tools” and bibliography.
• Introduction to Archives is tackling “arrangement & description,” which are the fancy technical terms for the order in which items are put in their boxes and how they are written up in the “finding aid” (another fancy term, which I think of as the archival equivalent of a detailed card catalog record plus book index: it helps researchers decide what–if anything–they want to see from a given collection, and where it’s located). We have been divided up into groups to write practice finding aids; my group got a collection of personal papers from the Simmons archive about an alumna who served as an Army dietitian during WWII.
• For History Methods this week, we were technically talking about archives (and since the class is full of future archivists, there were a lot of people personally invested in the subject). I personally became side-tracked by theoretical issues of space and gender through our reading assignment from Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History, which is about the professionalization of history in the 19th century and how it was explicitly coded as the realm of men. “Truth was where women were not,” Smith writes, “[truth was] some invisible and free territory purged of error by historical work” (which was done, of course, by male scholars). My weekly response paper was about how the physical sources of history and physical bodies (such as, ahem, the bodies of women) have the potential to disrupt our grand and tidy narratives of historical, universal “truth.”

In other news, the course offerings for Spring 2008 were hot off the press yesterday, at least in the History department. I find myself torn between “9/11 Narratives,” taught by an Islamic World historian with a frightening amount of energy, and “Lives of Faith: Early American Religious Biography & Autobiography.” In library science, I will most likely be taking Oral History and Cataloging.

. . . and then I stopped by the public library on my lunch hour today to return a few books, and somehow left with a few more: Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care; Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks; and The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (I’m reading the series in reverse order). If I find any time to actually read any of these titles, you’ll hear about it here . . .

Yes, it really is 12:27 am and yes, I’m really writing an entry to this blog. I took two Excedrin this afternoon after work to drive away a lurking migraine so that I could be coherent in Archives class. This plan worked, as far as it went, but now it is the early morning, and I really ought to be sleeping in preparation for my first morning at the DCR internship. Instead, I’m up on the computer, searching for a bakery that serves Boston Cream Pie, reading the latest on feministing, answering e-mail, listening to The Corrs Live in Dublin, and wondering when this late-September heat wave is going to end . . .

I do keep meaning to write that post on all the interesting theory we are reading in my History Methods class, but I’ve been frittering away my time building silly wiki pages and silly html pages for my “technology orientation requirement” and rooting around for a digital source for my history paper on using primary sources. The digital archives sources I have access to here, as a Simmons student, are mind blowing and time can get sucked into the void of historical enthusiasm with alarm speed. There’s this project called “Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000” that has an endless supply of women’s history diversions.

I chose a selection from the papers of the Oneida Community, a religious/free love/communitarian experiment that existed in upstate New York during the latter half of the nineteenth century. They report of a “criticism” of one of the women who lived in the community. “Criticism” was sort of like group therapy plus religious testimony: one member at a time would present themselves before the assembly and all the other people would talk about all the ways in which they could improve (morally, spiritually, socially, etc.). Yeah. Not my idea of a fun evening.

Oh, and I’m reading a fluffy novel ostensibly about eighteenth-century spies but which is really a regency romance in disguise (yes, bosoms do heave!) This actually connects rather nicely to the discussion we will be having tomorrow in History about the boundaries between historical fiction and non-fiction history (can the boundaries be drawn? where? are academic historians snobs? is historical fiction an affront to the profession?). That is, if we can make it passed the choppy waters of Foucault’s “The Repressive Hypothesis,” Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category for Analysis,” and Robert Darton’s The Great Cat Massacre. One fellow student said to me today, “I didn’t understand how they were connected at all!” Since I’m one of the discussion leaders, this is slightly worrying.

That having been said, I had best try to get some sleep, or other students’ struggles with postmodernism will be the least of my worries!