Straight No Chaser

After a long break from blogging about my digital library internship, I am resurrecting this blog into a blog for exploring my hobbies(music, traveling, and exercise, scrabble, Pilates) along with some bits of life about venturing into the real world of working as a librarian (hopefully as a medical librarian) in this time of uncertainty with the current job climate.


Tonight(April 12th), I saw Straight No Chaser perform at the IU-Auditorium, and they performed music from the 70's, 80's, 90's, with tunes by The Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Poison, to name a few. Tomorrow, the group will release their 3rd record entitled "With a Twist".

Check it out!.

Little 5 Weekend and End of Semester Happenings

It is little 5 weekend .., which will be a little nutty this weekend, with lots of festivities around campus. I will celebrate by watching the races for an hour (tops!) and running off and hiding in the library(while reading some children's books) :) ...I will also watch "Breaking Away" this weekend at some point.
Spring is here, and with the advent of spring..my semester internship is almost over.

I was able to do some XSLT work, courtesy of a XSLT tutorial from the w3 schools website, and then then trying it for myself. ...and I followed the XSLT code, and the code actually worked for me! I was able to get a count of how many times a particularly name was mentioned within the I-Witness, as well as placeName, and orgName. Yeah! Woot!

Still don't know why it is transforming into the HTML as a webpage, instead of the XML format...alas...it is a good learning experience so far.

I also have a interview at the law school to work with the XML Coding Project (Brevier Legislative Reports) on Monday. Hopefully, I will get it !

Things to Come...Maybe?

I applied for a student job at the Law Library where I hope to encodecopies of the Brevier Legislative using my newly learned skills in XML, TEI, and P5. I applied on Wednesday, and I submitted my resume, cover letter to the contact person ASAP, as the job annoucement is only posted until 4/17/09.

A description of the Brevier Reports includes...

Brevier Legislative Reports
The Brevier Legislative Reports were published biennially from 1858 to 1887 and are a verbatim report of the legislative history of the Indiana General Assembly during those years. The volumes also include veto statements and other messages from the Governor. These are a unique set of documents because there is no other detailed and comprehensive record of the debates and speeches from the floor of the Indiana Senate chamber and the Hall of the House of Representatives for this time period. The volumes also contain a record of each bill introduced in the House and Senate, and on a broader scale they are rich with detailed firsthand accounts that reflect the conditions of the times and aid in the understanding of the issues present in Indiana in the mid to late nineteenth century.

So hopefully, I will have paying job in the near future, and I can end my employment at my present job in the Wells Library...

Winding Down....

Earlier this month, I have finished all of the encoding for the I-Witness publications. As a review, I encoded 11 out of 13 issues of the I-Witness using the XML markup language, and I only started the encoding process in mid to late February, so I finished everything relatively quickly. There were some QC issues that I needed to fix, but M.D. (my internship supervisor), said my coding work looked great. :)

I also caught a big mistake where the one of the pages of I-Witness was not scanned into the OCR (a method of digitalization for further review), and it had one page listed twice in one of the issues.

Next up, a possibility of some work on the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP), which is a set of publications created with a goal to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The works, selected with the assistance of the Advisory Board, will include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of them.

I haven't started on this project, but maybe sometime soon?!?

Another option for further work on the I-Witness is to do a schematron validation (another layer of validation) . From what I have been told, it should not take very long to do.

I was looking at interesting UITS steps workshops offered at the IU library recently, and I found one that peaked my interest. The title of the workshop is called XML: Transforming Content with XSLT and XPath, and it talked about features of XSLT (which is a transformation language) and XPATH (is a language used to query the data stored in an XML document). I thought both topics within XML were pretty interesting.....

As a result of taking the workshop, I am attempting to do some XSLT work on the IWitness, where I am counting the number of times a person's name is mentioned in a particular issue of the I-Witness. So I have been doing tutorials..and a bit of reading about XSLT during the past week.


Little 5 is next week...and hopefully, it will be warmer this last year...
...and the UNC Tarheels won the NCAA tourney this year, but it wasn't much of a contest..but it was still fun to watch.

Good Things in March....

1. Chicago was fun, as I went to to Shedd's Aquarium, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Field Museum. I also went to the Chicago Public Library, which was absolutely beautiful. Another highlight, I went to the Apple Store of Chicago. My mecca...
( My next trip will be to visit the Wrigley Field and the Museum of Science and Technology.)
2. I have finished coding all of the issues of the I-Witness, Yeah!.

3. When I was QCing all of the issues of the I-Witness based on feedback from M.D., I caught a error when a page was not scanned onto the computer. I was glad I caught the mistake.
4. Now that the issues are coded, M.D. will QC the issues for any mistakes, and let me know if there are any present within the issues.
5. In the meanwhile, I am reading articles about metadata, which is an area I am interested in, as I hear and/or read it about it on a regularly basis. I thought about taking the SLIS class about metadata, but I have heard it is taught on a very conceptual basis...I much prefer things taught on a practical basis. These metadata are written from a practical standpoint, and how digitial libraries utilize metadata within their work. So these should be interesting.
6. Hopefully, I may start working on the other law digital library project soon..but that depends on things outside of my control.
7. Carolina is still in the final Four for the NCAA tourney.....hopefully, things will go well on Saturday night. Tarheels, Baby!.

Halfway Point

Well..here I am two days until Spring Break (Chicago..here I come :) ), and I only have 3 more issues left of my law newsletter to code into XML before I am officially done with all of the issues. When I hit that point, I am assuming that I will help in the QC'ing of all the newsletters to check of encoding mistakes/issues that may have arisen and perhaps(?) I could do some metadata work with the project. That should be interesting and fun,
My internship supervisor, M.D., may also get my input for another law school XML encoding project in creating documentation guidelines. Which would be cool. It would be wicked cooler, if I was able to work on that project in the law school, after my internship is finished in May.

The Wii fit is fun...and I also got DDR, so I will be a dancing fool in my own apartment during spring break.

Chugging Along...

Well, I have (almost) finished encoding two issues of the newsletter, and I am finding that it comes with experience, and it comes easily to me. I have had a few questions regarding coding certain things. , ..but it seems to be maybe I have a knack for this type of stuff (who knows). Although, in my first experience with coding in Information Architecture for the Web class, I really didn't like encoding, since I really didn't like the guy who taught the class. (mainly because he doesn't teach well)..but that is another topic for another day.

But I am really enjoying this internship gig..and hopefully, it will give me a leg up when it comes to applying for jobs.

Tonight, I bought a Wii..mainly only to play the Wii Fit. That should be fun.