Day 97: Mostly Serendipitous

Serendipity is a huge topic in librarianship. Heck, it's a huge issue in information and knowledge organization, period.

In fact, serendipity is one of the things most organizational systems are designed around. Dewey and Library of Congress, the two ways of organizing a library that you are most likely to be familiar with, both aim to "facilitate serendipity" by grouping similar volumes together. It's why you can go to "The Cookbook Section" or "The Canadian History Section"of the library and why we don't just organize all the books, fiction and non-fiction, by author's name or title. We want you to go to a section looking for a specific book and realize "hey, here's that book I was looking for, but this one right next to it is actually going to be better for what I need!"

We can get into all the arguments we want to about whether or not it's really serendipitous if it's been arranged that way, engineered serendipity if you will, but the fact is that it is useful, helpful and just plain fantastic whether or not it's "true" serendipity.

But I'd always just taken the word for granted. It's probably this or that Greek root meaning "divine guidance" or some such, peppered with a little Latin, left to stew in 3 or 4 different romance languages, before finally being looted by English. Or so I thought...

Lesson 97: The term "Serendipity" was inspired by a (mostly) Persian tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip" in which the titular three princes come upon information through happenstance and coincidence and are able to infer all manner of things.

The tale had been printed, reprinted, retold, reformed, combined with other tales, modified through the years adding elements from different tales from other locales or inspiring similar tales in other locales, but eventually made it to a book Horace Walpole read as a boy. It was this "silly fairy tale" that inspired him to coin the term "serendipity" in 1754.

If you're interested in reading a summary of the story, learning more about these Princes of Serendip and how the word serendipity came to be, I found this article in two parts that explains it all quite in depth.

Happy reading!

Day 54: And so it begins again.

Let it be known: Today was the beginning of the end of the first half of my first year of library school.

My last cataloguing class.

Cue the over-dramatic sobs.

Seriously though, I liked cataloguing. And if I ever have a labelmaker and a bunch of free time, I'm totally going to Dewey-decimalize my entire non-fiction book collection. And if it's that much free time, I may just do the same to my fiction.

Because, yes: I am that much of a nerd.

Looking even further forward than the mere end of semester...

Work wanted to know my holiday plans to get December/January tentatively scheduled, so I had to actually check over my schedule for next semester.

Lesson 52: 3 weeks off for Christmas, and four-day weekends all semester.

I thought I only had 2 weeks off for Christmas, but I've actually got post-New Years recovery time!

I feel like I planned really well! Or... well, we'll see how I feel about that when next semester rolls around.

All my classes crammed into two days, with no breaks, makes me feel like every day of school next semester is going to be like my Wednesdays... Except even more condensed. Rather than class from 8:35-5:25 with leisurely lunch 'n library breaks, it'll be 8:35-2:25 with no breaks but the ones my profs give me.

Better start packing lunches more consistently!

Also, I guess the posting is going to become very sparse next month... The only days that will count as a day of library school will be my exam days. And I'll really just be a rain cloud those days.

Unless I can reign that in to provide an analysis of the difficulty of the exam in question and the apparent effectiveness of my studying... Hmmmm...

Day 49: WARNING! Cyborg puppies conspire to separate New Brunswick from Canada!

Today was our first lab about Dewey Decimal in my Cataloguing class. I've always loved Dewey. I worked in a library, and I know how to find everything I could possibly want in a Dewey system without a catalogue. But having never learned it formally, I learned a great many things today about this odd, rather outdated, system.

Lesson 47: Dewey Decimal Classification holds some very bizarre things to be true.

These things include, but are not limited to:

all domesticated animals being technology. Mechanical puppies? Check!

a New Brunswick free Canada.

conspiracy theories being affiliated with computers.

Actually, that last one's not really that odd, given the rise of conspiracy-culture fuelled by the internet.

But my favourite thing about Dewey? This rap:



Also, do you like the new picture of myself I've included along the right side? It's from our Quidditch Yule Ball Poster photo shoot last night, and I thought it'd be nice to actually have a good picture of myself on my blog... I'm normally the one behind the camera, so there are very few good pictures of me. And in this one I'm flying a broom! Huzzah!

I edited it, but the photo credit goes to Lindsey P. Cameron, aka Widget.