A Stamp Well-Used

My first piece of mail contained this, from my mother. Thanks, mom!

New Year, New Job, New Everything

A lot has happened in the past few months, and I’ve gone from working with manuscripts to landing my first full-time job as a reference librarian in a small, academic library! Very exciting. I still have one quarter of library school to go, which I’ve been doing online, but it’s fantastic to have a Real Job.

So around Thanksgiving I started searching for a new apartment in New York, finishing up my penultimate term at Drexel, and went full-time for a bit at Penn in an attempt to finish up everything. I didn’t manage to move in to an apartment until last weekend, but I’m finally here, and trying to catch up with school and this job before the students return next week. So far I have an Official nameplate (in a Roman font on a faux-walnut background) and my desk has been decorated with a two-headed stuffed rabbit, a top from Ukraine, a small bust of Artemis, and nunzilla.

Troubles with Apple

I just got my third iPod Touch. I bought one of the 1stgen iPod Touches with my Macbook in August 2008, and since then have had two, cryptic, massive failures out of the blue. So after trekking out to Ardmore (a 2 hour trip) for the second time in the past 4 months, I have my third, 1stgen iPod Touch.

I find myself miffed that they can fail so easily with no warning, and that the utterly dismissive “Genius” who tossed a new iPod at me before shoving some paperwork at me and leaving just gave me a sad face and said “bad luck” when I asked how this could happen. Clearly this is a problem with shoddy craftsmanship. My previous laptop, a perky 2004 iBook, had three logicboard failures during its three-year lifespan.

For something supposed to be so top-of-the-line, I expect a little more from Apple, and maybe that’s wrong. In any case, after how rudely I was treated today at the Apple Store and how faulty these are, my next computer will most likely be a PC I build myself. At least then these “bad luck” failures will be easier to fix and cheaper.

Windows 7

I took advantage of that awesome Windows 7 discount for students ($30 for Home Premium or Professional!), as I have to use Windows for certain classes, and my copy of XP was horribly buggy. However, while that $30 price was very sweet, it took me a full 24 hours to get it up, running, and activated. This is partially because I installed it on a mac, partially because of the way the student discount works (third-party distributor). And while you can order a bootable dvd of the software for an extra $12, it takes about 2-3 weeks to be delivered.

So to get Windows 7 Professional x64 running on my macbook (running Snow Leopard, using Boot Camp), I had to:

Berlioz and Saint-Saëns

The Philadelphia Orchestra is starting up again after the summer break, and once again I’m glad to be part of the eZseatU program ($25 for a full year of free concerts). My first experience with Berlioz was to see Faust, which was good but I hadn’t been so enthralled that I went out and got a recording.

Charles Dutoit conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra and Chorus. The lineup was:

• BERLIOZ – Resurrexit
• SAINT-SAËNS – Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”)
• BERLIOZ – Te Deum

The Resurrexit completely astounded me. It’s really a wonderful piece, and I think one of Charles Dutoit’s favorites. I found an earlier recording from Montreal, conducted by Dutoit. If you haven’t heard this piece, check it out here. Although it was part of a mass (now lost, as Berlioz felt it not up to par), you can really hear Berlioz’s Romantic side – the piece is loud and passionate.

Thursday is Bartok and Brahms, two of my favorites!

Really Big Manuscripts

Probably not going to be a reality show at any point, but there are a lot of Really Big Manuscripts out there which one normally doesn’t get to see. One notorious breed of super huge manuscripts are what my coworker refers to as “Filzas,” or large books of Italian accounts and legal documents from the Renaissance. She works on the majority in our collection, which are Italian, but sometimes Latin ones pop up and then I get put to work. Here’s one from the Gondi, Medici, and Machiavelli families:

Gondi and Machiavelli family Filza of huge proportions

To show an idea of the scale, I used an Official Measurement Tool:

Chapstick vs. Machiavelli

While most of this was just a collection of wills, inheritances, and family accounts, one page had a decoration by a bored scribe on it:

Machiavelli face

Vernon, NJ

I took a vacation for about 10 days in northern New Jersey, in a small town called Vernon.
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I was charged with caring for: two rats, three cats, a small pond of fish, a deer and her two fauns, two squirrels, and two finches. Located in the middle of the mountains, it rained once a day but was incredibly green and lovely.

Gambit

Grendel

Kimmie, Trini, and Spaulding are fed

Chipmunk eating a piece of waterelon I tossed over the fence

Spaulding Disapproves of whatever you’re doing

Spiro the Squirrel (or possibly Aristotle, I couldn’t tell them apart)

Trini and Spaudling watch Spiro with great interest

The local papers had interesting articles…

Favorite napping spot of every cat

Corn and apples for the deer

Seated Spaulding

Macabre Manuscripts

One of my projects this summer was to examine some “hybrid books” (a printed book with some manuscript – handwritten – sections) and describe the manuscript portions. Most/all of these can’t even be found in any kind of online catalog, only in the card catalog in the Rare Book room, and even they will only make passing mention of the manuscripts within the hybrid books.

The first one I dealt with was especially interesting – the printed book was the Speculum Perfectionis by Henricius de Herpf (1524), but bound around it was a collection of poetry by Denis Faucher (Dionysius Faucherius) from ca. 1530-50. Here’s what makes this manuscript more interesting than an ordinary manuscript (click for larger versions):

Vigilance in Virtue

And two pages later….

Inevitability of Death

Fun stuff! Here are some more pictures from these hybrid books, with descriptions in the individual pages:

Vigilance in Virtue

Inevitability of Death

Step 1

Man in Initial

Mary

Speculum Perfectionis

Historica pericunda sanctissima matris Anne, by Rudolf Agricola, Leipzig, 1507

Litterae Graecorum

Grecismus Cornutus

Philipp Melanchthon portrait, by Dürer

A closeup of the incipit of the Grecismus

New semester

I see that I have inadvertently taken a summer vacation from the blog. My apologies, classes got the best of me and then I moved to a new place around Society Hill and have spent the rest of the summer reading and catsitting in exotic locales (like New Jersey).

I did, however, get to deal with some very interesting manuscripts, which I’ll write about in their own post. Classes start in a couple of weeks, and it looks like I’ll be taking Digital Preservation, Resources in Social Sciences [I'm a humanities girl, the social sciences are mostly a mystery to me], and Metadata & Resources Description. I nearly took Digital Libraries but decided there was too much overlap with Digital Preservation.

Last quarter was probably my favorite so far – my Content Representation class was by far my best class at Drexel, both useful and challenging (also the only class I didn’t feel I’d get an automatic A in), and my web design class was really fun, as well. I liked coming from these classes with something constructive I’d actually made – in these cases, a thesaurus and website, respectively.

Two more quarters, and then I’ll have my degree. So soon…

Four Concerts & New Classes

Back in Philadelphia, which is quickly vaulting itself into Spring (with some crazy thunderstorms – hail!), and classes have started once more. This quarter looks promising – I was unsure at first whether or not Cataloging would be for me, but the kind of cataloging I do is so different from normal cataloging that I think the overlap will be minimal.

I’m in a web design class, called “Internet Information Resource Design” (why that instead of “web design,” I’ve no idea), which is fairly fun so far, although we haven’t done much except for create blogs for class.

However, I’m most excited about my Content Representation class. This is really the first class that has felt like graduate school. My readings for the first two weeks fill a binder completely (memo to self: buy much larger binder), and are really quite interesting – a lot of broadening of definitions of things like “information” (ie, a train can be a document), learning about metadata, reading about Dublin Core, and so on.

I’m excited to learn how to catalog and classify things like images, or music. We also have to create a thesaurus (not a Roget-esque thesaurus – for an explanation of the kind of thesaurus I’m talking about, click here), and that’s where I’m currently running problems – no idea what I would want to create a controlled vocabulary for. Regardless, this class will keep me on my toes, but I think I will get quite a bit out of it.

I’ve been managing to see at least a concert a week, even while in San Francisco. (See explanations of the concerts below the cut)