About
March 31, 2009
Blogger at the Library
Welcome to my blog and MLIS portfolio! My name is Mahrya, and I’m a fledgling information specialist. When I began library school in 2006, I had a vague idea that I wanted to leave the world of law firms for the world of preserving old things. I loved being around historical documents of any stripe–especially thrown off things like old books, photographs, antique postcards and filmstrips–and the thought of working with these kinds of things for a living excited me. At my law job, I was wrangling massive, scattered document collections and felt that I had neither the conceptual nor the practical tools to do my job effectively. I was literally sinking under piles of unorganized paper. This desire to organize, coupled with my archival yearnings, was the catalyst that eventually launched me into the iSchool.
Two years and many classes later, I’ve realized that information organization really is my bag. I’ve done quite a bit of cataloging, taxonomy building and surrogate creating, and I love the intricate process of carefully describing a document so that it can be found and understood. My favorite things to work with are non-traditional or non-book items, and I have been lucky enough to have quite a bit of practice cataloging and organizing various types of information. I’ve worked with government documents at the National Archives and Records Administration, with rare art books at the Seattle Art Museum, with web taxonomy and thesaurus creation. I was recently promoted to librarian at a small academic library on the East side of Lake Washington.
I’m using this blog as a space to write about my professional experiences, to muse over the things I’m learning, to scrutinize the portfolio I’m creating and to actually present the portfolio itself. In this way, the blog represents both my portfolio and my notes about the portfolio. It may be hard to parse the two, but I think that’s okay. I want to show that this process is iterative; much like my career, it is a work in progress.
When I’m not librarianeering, I read fiction with my book club, watch movies with my movie club, hang with my husband and cat and generally enjoy the splendors of the Pacific Northwest.
