Working for the Q Center

Last semester, I searched furiously for jobs/internships relevant to information professionals/librarians. I applied for a digital literacy internship, got the interview, and failed, probably because I showed up to the interview dressed like Flava Flav. I applied to a few other jobs with no response until I heard back from the Q Center.

The Q Center is a place where gay/lesbian/transgendered youth can go for advice, do homework, meet mentors, and just have a place to feel safe and be themselves. So you might be asking, why did the Q Center need my services? The center has a very nice collection of gay/lesbian/transgendered fiction and non-fiction available for the youth to check out. The director of the center desired to expand their collection and hired me to develop an acquisition plan. In addition to the acquisition plan, I had to go through all the books to see which ones were missing, I had to migrate their book database from a '90's computer to a new millennium computer, and I had to contact Q members to ask for the books back.

The interesting part of the story came in the interview. The director asked me how I've been involved with social justice and gay & lesbian issues. I sort of froze because I'm an aspiring librarian and never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd have a question like this for a library intern position. After I stopped mentally screaming, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH." I collected my composure and crafted tales of my philosophy minor and mentioned the fact that I lived comfortably with my homosexual cousin. Whew. I was nervous because I felt like I had to be a gay/lesbian/transgendered student or even advocate to do library type work. Also, I did think for a split second about lying and saying that I was gay, but I couldn't live with something like that. I was nervous. Don't judge me.

Luckily, I got the job, worked a few months and helped to add over 100 works to the Q Center collection. I'm happy with the experience, but in retrospect the interview was perhaps the scariest moment of my life. Long story short. Expect the unexpected.

searching and demanding....and yelling

So we're learning aaaaaallll about searching this week. Like, AAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL about searching. Like, my-head-is-going-to-spin-off-and-crack-in-half-and-spill-my-brains-all-over-my-lap kind of searching. And something that's come up a couple of times is relevancy rankings in search engines. Like, when you put "gonnabe librarians" in a search engine what comes up? I'll tell you what comes up in Yahoo: BUPKIS! In Bing: LESS THAN BUPKIS. In Yahoo you get my delinquent FriendFeed account and something from Digg saying it's been Dugg once. (And guess who Dugg my blog that one time......thaaaaaaat's right...ME. Everyone go on Digg right now and Digg Gonnabe Librarians! Digg)

Anyway, Google had the blog listed, but ranked #2 because the embarrassing 1 Digg thing came up first. (Need I remind you? DIGG GONNABE LIBRARIANS!)

(Would some brilliant person out there tell me why this blog isn't ranked #1 when the name of it is Gonnabe Librarians?! And the URL is gonnabelibrarians.blogspot.com?! Doesn't that count?!)

So, here's what I figure I need to do, according to things learned this week: I need to splatter "gonnabe librarians" all over the blog. So:

GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!

And they say if it's in big, bright font it's more likely to come up. But I can't do big, bright font because Blogger doesn't have tools for that and I don't have time to look up the html code right now.


GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!
GONNABE LIBRARIANS!

And I guess since this is supposed to be for SU library students, and anyone interested in library school--

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY! LIBRARY STUDENTS!

And FUTURE LIBRARIANS! And MSLIS!

Ummmm.....SU! SYRACUSE ORANGE! SYRACUSE LIBRARIAN-TO-BE! LIBRARIANS OF THE FUTURE!

LIBRARY NUTS!
LIBRARY WHORES!

Whoa. Ease up there, cowgirl.

Oh, and of course the best thing to do is get linked to from other sites, but since I don't think anyone is reading this who also has their own blog and wouldn't be embarrassed to have a link to this one, I think I'm out of luck. But, on the off chance that luck is with me: LINK TO THIS BLOG! Or tell someone else to! Be demanding, like me.