If It's Mid-November, It Must be Paper Season

I've been quiet this week because I've been struggling to figure out what I'm doing for all my papers and projects will be for my library school classes this week.

First on deck, due the Thursday after Thanksgiving, is a 20 page research paper that uses at least 5 academic journals as sources. Although I'm still pulling the ideas together, I'm doing social networking sites and how they are being used in academic libraries. Fortunately, it's an area I'm interested in. For the most part what I've seen libraries doing is using social networking tools as portals to get to already existing tools on websites. I'm hoping I find some examples that step beyond that. At least at the moment I'll be focusing on Myspace, Facebook and Second Life.

Due the following Thursday, I have a group paper/presentation on disaster plans----not my choice. I realize it's important, but it's fairly boring research. One person in our group took the task of a small case study of the University of Maryland's policies while I'm doing the broader background research on the topic. A third person is putting the presentation all together.

The third paper is due the Monday after that. This is for my Humanities Research class, and I've been debating back and forth about what I want to do. Basically we have to research and write an annotated bibliography of sources for a particular area of research. I initially wanted to create a bibliography for avant pop, a lit movement that ran from the mid 90's and into the early 21st century. It involves a lot of my favorite writers (Kathy Acker, Stephen Shaviro, Lance Olsen, and more), but the problem is that most of the sources are online. My prof wanted no more than 1/2 of the sources we use be online, so that one was out. My next impulse was to create one for Cyberpunk. But after spending four hours in the library last night, I decided to broaden it to Sci-Fi in general. It should be fairly easy to pull together. I definitely plan on doing one for avant pop at some point---I'm sad to say it doesn't even have a wikipedia entry. But in the interest of time and ease for my paper, the broader topic makes more sense at this point.

Anyway, I'm catching up on reviews for the magazine as well, so I should have some appearing here over the next several days as well. Until next time...

Excelsior