shifting focus

For the first time in about three years, I have a fairly good idea of what I’ll be doing for the next three years: I’m going to be attending library school at the University of British Columbia in the joint masters program in library/archives. (I’ve actually known this for a few months, but never got around to mentioning it.) So to the extent that I’m still blogging, I’ll probably start discussing related topics in addition to whatever it is that I’ve been doing.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on shifting my reading habits: more history; more about information, broadly speaking, less day-to-day news. Over the last couple of years, I’ve become somewhat of a news junkie in my spare time – I even did an internship where I was supposed to be a sort of news junkie in my working time – but now that I have other reading projects to pursue, plus skills I’m trying to maintain or acquire, I’ve been slowly cutting back. I’m starting to feel so uninformed about topics over which I have no influence, like the details of legislative proposals on health care which will almost certainly be enacted, if they ever are, in a form different than whatever I could have read about today. I’m not dropping to a level of Yahoo headlines only, but I’ve reduced the number of blogs I read daily. On the other hand, I’m now reading many of the Vancouver Sun‘s feeds.

Oh, and while I’m mentioning things from a while back that I never got around to writing about here (but did mention on twitter), over at the Sunlight Foundation’s blog you can read something I wrote last month about Brandeis and the history of transparency. It was originally supposed to be the first of two or three posts but I simply ran out of time before my internship ended. I really got into the research – it was very kind of the people at Sunlight to allow me to indulge in my historical interests – and now that I’m taking a university class this summer here in California, I can get into an academic library again. So maybe I’ll pick up that thread over here. (I suppose I already have, in a way.)