Chuukaku.com

I can't quite believe that the course is over! I completed my dissertation and handed it in at the end of last week. I'm happy with it (although I've spotted a few things I'd change in retrospect: bound to happen) and looking forward to finding out the final results. My work on the Information Commons is complete, but I'm heading back to the IC at least two more times to give a couple of presentations on my study next week, for a CILIP UC&R Wales visit and an SRHE seminar.

On top of that, next week I'm starting my new job! It's a temporary post at De Montfort University, and I'm going to be an assistant librarian, working with the Business School. I have an MSc in Occupational Psychology, which is the study of business from a psychological perspective, which should give me a good start in the topic. I'm looking forward to starting, although a little nervous! This week has been a semi-break between course and job, although I've been tying up some loose ends and preparing for the presentations next week, so it's not all been holiday.

Obtaining my first professional post has made me reflect on this blog a little. I'm really happy I've kept it going throughout my graduate traineeship and my library course to my first job. I started the blog because I couldn't find any which documented that journey, and I hope it proves useful to people about to start librarian training. At the very least it's entertaining to me to look back at what I've been doing for the last two years, and a great record of all the things I've done. I'd recommend the process to anyone else too!

Note: Photograph is a view from the Information Commons, with the infamous comfy seating.

Labels: dissertation, jobs, MA, website

First things first: I've started a Twitter account associated with this blog. You can find me at www.twitter.com/katie_fraser and please do feel free to add me if you have a Twitter account. As it's brand new everything's looking rather sparse, but I've set up this blog to feed in and hopefully it will look more active soon.

Aside from the growing realisation that the amount of coursework in my second semester may well be infinite, things are going well Librarianship-wise. I've been moving a bit further with my dissertation project on Sheffield University's Information Commons and I'm enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with leading practioners and to follow my interests in learning / technologies / spaces into the library field. I submit my initial project proposal at the end of this week, and should have more news soon. In addition I'm launching into some of my coursework - in fact, today I'm supposed to be starting my evidence-based briefing paper on Virtual Research Environments, so I'd better stop being Web 2.0 and start being scholarly. Although the next essay is on Web 2.0 in Education - can I call this research?

Today's photograph was captured at Nottingham Station during one of my early morning trips to Sheffield. The signs had broken down and were going through an immensely entertaining reboot process. I love it when technology accidentally lets us behind the curtain in these ways.

Labels: MA, Web 2.0, website

I've just been making a few changes to my website, particularly the blog page. This has involved the creation of a blogroll page (still to be finished at the time of writing, which is why there aren't really any blogs in it yet) and I've used the space that's left in the sidebar to add in some drop down lists with labels in them. Sadly, as I host my blog remotely from the Blogger service, there is no way for me to create a more aesthetically pleasing tag cloud system, so this will have to be it (last I checked Blogger weren't too keen on remote hosters, so the functionality for us is somewhat limited).

Edit: I've managed to find a faux tag cloud generator instead, which I think presents the labels a little better.

Also on the to-do list is creating a page for my MA (it doesn't seem fair to have one for all the other degrees but not this one!). However, I'm reasonably happy with the re-shuffling I've achieved. With my HCI / usability background I'm always critical of how cluttered blog pages are so I'm trying to avoid it with mine (although it's entirely possible everyone reads through feeds anyway).

Labels: website

So, the question that has been no doubt on your mind since you approached this website, is what on earth does chuukaku mean? Well, as you can see on the nifty background of the site, chuukaku is the romanization (Roman alphabet spelling) of a Japanese word, and approximately translates to 'nucleus'. This website has the name as it refers to the site's place at the centre of my online presence. Packed in around the nucleus are my various academic endeavours, this blog, and various other information and ways of finding me.

One thing I really wanted to do when I got this site up and running was have a good look into the characters that made the word, aware that it is all too easy to make hilarious misinterpretations of Japanese characters (insert your own celebrity tattoo urban myths here). As you may have found out elsewhere on the site, I have a brief background in Japanese language study, and that, combined with working in a library, gives me a bit of a head start on finding out the meanings of characters (or kanji, as the word-symbols are called in Japanese).

The first character (the box on a stick, if you will) is one I'm already familiar with from my Japanese language days - we're pronouncing it 'chuu' in the word in question, but in fact characters in Japanese can have a number of different pronunciations. This is (at least partly) because the Japanese started off without a written language, and pretty much imported their characters wholesale from Chinese to refer to the sounds they already had in place. The character means 'middle' and is found in such combinations as chuugoku (middle country), which, probably because of the import, can be used to refer to China!

The second character can also be translated as nucleus, kernel, etc. when used independently, and the chuu mainly seems to be used for emphasis. The kaku bit is split into two parts. On the right is the symbol for 'the hog', the 12th sign of the zodiac. This can be used in different contexts, but apparently here it's referring to the acorns pigs eat. On the left is the condensed symbol for tree, and the tree being within the acorn leads to the idea of the nucleus - something large contained within something small. Hopefully this site will follow through even vaguely on this promise!

Labels: website