You might remember, if you've actually been reading along
with Matthew on his adventures in visiting all 22 branches of the VancouverPubic Library system, that he at one point borrowed a Magic: The Gathering novel after procuring a promise from a friend to read the
whole thing. Well I am that friend, and I am here to announce that I am a
promise breaker. Not that I didn't try, repeatedly for over a month (he had to
do a loan renewal trying to give me a more
than fair chance to not renege on my promise) to finish that book, but in the
end I had to give up in favor of finishing my last term paper in time to leave
for ALA in Chicago.
In my defense I will cite this info-graphic from Goodreads which is very non-scientifically (and thus not actually really quality evidence in my defense)
examining when and why people give up on reading a book. Notably under the “point
of no return” reasons for why people finally dropped a book, my experience with
this MTG novel was covered by five of the reasons people selected. This aligns
me with 81.6% of respondents for reasons why I was totally justified in deciding, while life may not exactly be too short, I certainly deserve better reading materials for lazy days than that novel. On the other hand, note that the percentage of respondents
agreeing with the various reasons listed under the point of no return equals
100.1%.
Which brings me to the second promise. Except it isn't
really officially a promise, just an offer Matthew made. While he is off gallivanting
about North America and will be bringing us tales from the libraries he finds
along the way, I am back in Vancouver spending endless hours researching and
reading about archives and libraries. Yup, I too am getting my Master of Library and Information Studies at UBC. I think I've visited around
11 or 12 of the local VPL branches since moving to Vancouver in January to
start this program, but I certainly had no reason to visit every last one of
them.
That is, until Matthew made me the offer I could not refuse –
restarting his project to visit and blog about every branch of VPL. I mean how
could I possibly pass up on this golden opportunity to garner fame and fortune
in the blogosphere? Beside, you might have noticed that Matthew has a very
specific point of view/obsession as he visits libraries (COMICS!), so I felt
like there was plenty of space for me to bring my own unique point of view to
this endeavor.
You might be curious as to how I will plan out, structure
and accomplish this goal. As we have already established, I’m a great fan of well
structured, scientific methods and results, so I will bring to bear my
considerable interests and skills in carefully managing this project. Which is
to say that I have no plan or method or timeline or any possible type of
organizational structure whatsoever for this project. On the other hand, I have
already visited a new library branch and taken pictures and notes for my next
blog post. So I feel like we are off to a good start. Here’s to crossing the
finish line.
--Anna
P.S. I just started a brand spanking new blog of my very
own, so feel free to follow my non-VPL related adventures here.
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