Productive Days

Normally, up here in the Cooperstown, we have Professional Seminars on Fridays.  Professional Seminars are days when guests, like different people who work in the museum field, come in and lecture for the day, telling us about their experiences.  Since this was the  first week of classes though, a professional seminar was not scheduled.  Thus, I received a day to be active.

There is nothing like actually being able to get up and moving in the morning and get out for a run.  Cooperstown is actually a beautiful town, with lots of cute and historic-looking streets to run down and soak up some fresh morning air, especially while the weather is still halfway decent.  I promise pictures at a future date, but its unfortunatley raining at the moment, so it is not the best of times to go out and retrace the running route.  

Besides the exercise and getting a few chores done, I also had the chance to go to the library and get some work done.  One of the assignments for next week that I wanted to get done today was for my Culture and Collections class, which involved finding a historic paper print and writing about it.  I decided to start in the library and wander the stacks.  While down in the basement I discovered an old New York register and almanac dating from 1831.  In the front of the book there was a lithograph of Albany's City Hall.  Take the old, well-worn book off the wall, I sat down and studied it for an hour, and tried to decide what story the picture was telling.  

After about an hour I finished up my writing and went t go print out some journal articles to read for my American Cultures class.  While CGP and SUNY Oneonta, have a great collection of online resources, I still found myself logging onto my UConn web account and looking up some journals that way.  I find that UConn's site is definitely more user friendly and also seems to have more resources readily available, but that;s probably because its a much bigger institution.    The UConn web log-in is a one time deal, you start the session by logging on and then you can navigate through different gated research sites, the Oneonta website, requires to you login every time you move to a different database, which is much more time consuming and my main issue.  Besides that, UConn's website is a little better formated and has easier interfaces established, so its much easier to find basic information quickly.  I found though Oneonta had a lot of what I was looking for the information was easier to get to on UConn's page.