The End of Beginning

Today, is pretty much what is called the end of the introduction period for first year students.  Today we presented our orientation project at the New York State Historical Society Staff meeting and then ended the day with a President's Reception at the Fenimore Art Museum.  

During our week of orientation we were assigned a project.  The project was to create a promotional video for the Cooperstown Graduate Program based off a bunch of clues.  We received about thirty words and we had to figure out what they referred to and find a way to incorporate them into a video.  Our class decided to base our video off MacGyver  and created Museum MacGyver, the tales of a student as he solves problems and learns about the core values of CGP.  The video wound up coming out great.  Once we figured out what the clues were we went ahead and organized ourselves.  My mine role was to help write the script, which I personally think was quick hysterical.  After the script was done we filmed the video, which allowed me to make appearances in a couple of scenes.  Finally our fantastic editing crew went to work and did something magical, to make the video absolutely fantastic.  When we presented it to the NYSHA staff of maybe 60 or so, they seemed to enjoy it and laughed a lot.

Classes preceded as normal afterwards, and I handed in my first official paper as a Graduate Student.  A short four page paper about Alan Taylors book: William Cooper's Town. I also had the opportunity to dig through some of the Fenimore Art Museum's print collections so I could journal about what I found for my Culture and Collections class.  I worked off of a aquatint from what I think was at least the 1860s or 1870s, showing a picture of the Newark during the War of 1812.

The night ended with a President's Welcome Reception in honor of the first-year students at the Fenimore Art Museum.  The staff of NYSHA, the Fenimore Art Museum, The Farmer's Museum, locals from the community and the President of SUNY Oneonta were all present along with the staff and students of CGP.  It was a great chance to network and talk to different people.  Its also awesome to talk to the president of the university for the second time in a month, something that I never experienced at UConn, you can really tell she personally care about our program and the students. It made for a great night of professional socializing.

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.

Zotero and the Clown Car in Oneonta

Today, we journeyed from our secluded little town to the main campus in Oneonta to learn more about the library resources that they had to offer.  Oneonta is about 30-40 minutes south of Cooperstown, and is the closet thing in the area to a large town, and by that I mean it has a Walmart and something it considers a mall.  I have yet to see the entire town so I don't know what else it has to offer, I believe that Oneonta has a single A baseball team as well.  The funny thing is that while Oneonta is considered a big town in Upstate New York, it is small compared to my hometown and most towns in Connecticut.  In the end it does have the important thing though, a Walmart Supercenter.

It was well worth the trip to the SUNY Oneonta main campus, because during the course of our class we were introduced to one life changing program called http://www.zotero.org/.  This is a program that hooks up to both your web-brower and word or open office.  It keeps track of all the books, journals, newspapers, articles, websites, etc. that you look at and want to use as sources in a paper, and records their citation information, then you can access all the information and have it automatically create footnotes for you in your word document.  I can't even begin to describe the number of features this program has, it even allows you to share your information with other users.  I have a good few hours of exploring its uses in front of me, but I swear its going to change my entire research process, and for the better.

On top of learning about this amazing program, six of needed to return to campus right after class and had to fit into one car, so that was interesting.  As soon as we reached the car, we saw a cop sitting the parking lot looking around, and now had to pile into the car in front of him.  Two people sat in the front and then four of us were crammed into the backseat for the thirty minute ride home.  It was definitely not comfortable but certainly funny.  Luckily we made it back alive.