The summer's almost over!

Last weekend I turned in my first big paper in my Information Organization class, so I was thinking we the summer semester must be half over. I looked at the calendar for the rest of the semester and realized it's almost over! Including this week, there are only four more weeks left!

For some reason, this summer semester has just flown by much faster than any other semester so far. It's been busy, but not too busy, and I've had a lot of homework, but not too much homework. The two classes I'm taking work really well together, I think, and that may have helped some.

All that's left now is one more big paper in Information Organization, and a final paper in References Services about my experience answering questions for the IPL (which thankfully, I answered all three questions I needed to early on before the homework level really picked up in both classes and the competition to claim questions picked up as well). Obviously there's also the usual weekly readings and discussion board posts, but those aren't too bad.

Excellent Professor

This weekend my first big paper in my Information Organization class is due. I have roughly 3/4, maybe a little more, of the first draft completed, and already I've e-mailed chunks of what I have so far to the professor for comment, and he's responded with good feedback. (Fortunately none of it has said, "This is no good, please start over," because I would cry; the paper is already 24 pages without counting the references at the end. I can't imagine having to completely start over on it.)

He is willing to read as many drafts as we send him, complete or partial, and send back comments within 24 hours. How nice is that? It's been really nice to know, before getting a grade, whether I'm on the right track, if there are areas that I should expand on, or if I left something important out altogether. And because he only accepts drafts up to 3 days before the due date, it's a good motivator to not wait until the last minute to get at least the first draft done.

I have never had a professor make this kind of generous offer before; it has got to be extremely time consuming to read through the drafts and offer constructive comments on them. I wonder how many students take him up on his offer?

Resource Guide

The most recent school project I've been working on is a resource guide, or pathfinder, for my reference services class. The requirements are that it be either a MS Word document or a web page, is for a specific audience, and includes 10-12 web reputable web resources on the topic of the resource guide. We were given the option to also include some print resources if they seemed appropriate to our topic, but the total number of resources could not be more than 15.

I decided to make a resource guide on vegetarianism for teenagers, and to make use of the XHTML and CSS I learned two semesters ago to make it as a web page.

My Teen Guide to Vegetarianism

It looks kind of cheesy, but if I keep working on it, I'll keep finding things to change and never turn it in.