Sarah Aspen So I’m starting grad school again, this time at an in-person program rather than online. Now that I’ve spent a week back in the classroom, I wanted to talk about some of the differences I see between these two approaches. This is a different university with different faculty, and as such there will be inherent … Read more
What is is There is a significant difference between recognizing something, and having a full recollection of that something. The human mind is hardwired (in many cases) with shortcuts for things. There’s no reason to expend the mental energy to fully recall something every time that you recognize it. So the brain will fire the … Read more
Starship Librarians is a recently published collection of short stories where authors explore what the future of librarianship might look like when humans have pursued the stars. Science fiction has long been a genre for exploring contemporary social issues through a futuristic lens, allowing us to examine difficult problems and uncertain futures with enough distance … Read more
Introduction There is a significant body of literature examining the experience of Autistic children in educational settings, including in libraries. The LIS journals are replete with analyses of programming and service provision to Autistic children and their caregivers, discussing strategies to work around their disorders and deficits. Despite the certainty that Autistic children grow into … Read more
I’ve been a contributor to many open source projects since I was in high school. I wrote a driver for a network card that’s still included in the Linux kernel, contributed code to big projects with lots of developers like Zotero and Mastodon, and to tiny projects like Loomio. I am even the primary maintainer … Read more
I’m a queer autistic *international* student now. What does it feel to be restarting this journey with that additional adjective? A lot of things in my life have changed over the last year. The largest is arguably that I have left my original MLIS program to pursue the same degree at another university… in another … Read more
One of my assignments this semester was to examine HTML and XML, two markup languages written by humans and processed by computers to codify information. The assignment was to explain how XML is better than HTML. That’s a loaded question, as we’ll see. HTML, hypertext markup language, is a markup language specifically designed for the … Read more
One of the things I’ve learned in my time as an autistic student is that I have to adapt neurotypical learning strategies to fit the way my brain works. Rather than taking the instructions provided by my teachers at face value, I have to dig into the underlying concepts and find ways to reverse engineer … Read more
Libraries are often described as anchors of their communities. Their mission statements ramble on about the critical role libraries serve in meeting the needs of their communities. And it’s true! We have programming for technology tutoring, language classes, car seat installation, line dancing, video games, LEGOs, and community gardens. We lend tools and register voters … Read more
Introduction Bibliographic information organization is the process of taking metadata about pieces of information such as books and journal articles, standardizing the metadata into a common format to act as a stand-in for the original information, and organizing the metadata to support information seeking needs. Enough metadata must be retained for the information seeker to … Read more
