The weird thing about doing library school in a program based in Silicon Valley (@sjsuischool.bsky.social) is that one is constantly confronted with the specter of undead technology. #GradSchoolGripes

Undead tech takes a couple forms:

Restraining myself from ending my portfolio section on doing lit reviews by saying "Okay, but forget that, as a practicing professional you need to read blogs and talk to people"

#GradSchool #GradSchoolGripes #MLIS

Help my metadata prof's first example of something to make a MARC record for is an Individual. Cancelled. Check.

Complete with an S/C note, multiple creators, and a subject heading

What are we doing y'all

#GradSchoolGripes #BadArchivesPractice #Metadata

One of my professors just said* that "many publishers use TEI" which… do they? As someone who did a bunch of TEI encoding in 2021, I did not get the sense that it was a particularly lively standard—but I'm no expert on the publishing industry

*via pre-recorded lecture

#GradSchoolGripes

#GradSchoolGripes My metadata professor is out here asking us to create an "XML schema" for an assignment, but we haven't covered any of the schema languages yet, and looking over the instructions he clearly just wants an XML *document* 🤦🏻‍♂️

This bodes poorly for the rest of this semester

I'm surprised to hear my metadata prof say he doesn't see the DublinCore "Coverage" element used much to indicate geographic locations, only date of creation. I don't use DC directly much, but our practice (and that of most shops I'm familiar with) is to add a geoloc when possible #GradSchoolGripes

Update: This week's assignment in the same class is to *checks notes* copy-paste metadata from a DAMS into a DOCX

"You will be using an existing description of a digital object and then entering that metadata in the descriptive metadata form that I have provided below."

#GradSchoolGripes #SJSU 🫠

Tempted to wrap up this whole section on research with "Without survey research, we never would have gotten the MPLP paper, and archivists might still be physically processing at the item or folder level today"

#GradSchool #GradSchoolGripes #MPLP

Also the lists of metadata standards always include EAD but never DACS and it's driving me up the wall. You put AACR2 on here but not MARC, what gives?

#GradSchoolGripes

"The postpositivist tradition comes from 19th-century writers, such as Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Newton, and Locke"

2 of these things are not like the others, methodology textbook!

#GradSchoolGripes

Oy, someone in this week's grad school discussion seems to just be fully using LLMs for their posts. But they're citing the LLMs, so apparently it isn't against SJSU policy? Anyway, love 2 have a discussion where my points are just summarized back at me, citations and all 🙃

#GradschoolGripes #SJSU

Help my records management textbook opens the chapter on retention schedules with the claim that "keep everything forever" is a professionally defensible position

#GradschoolGripes #Archives