Well, I made it through my first quarter of graduate school here at UCLA.  It got a little hairy at the end there but I got everything turned in.

For Information in Society our final paper had to be a description of a “new idea” within the information management profession.  I wrote about the need for librarians, information managers, and archivists to devote the skills of their profession towards social justice issues. In particular, documenting human rights abuses and archiving documents that detail human rights abuses.

For Information Structures I described a catalog databasing system that could easily help a user uniquely identify a work within a collection.  I essentially wrote about how the database system used in LibraryThing is very user-friendly and could be applied to a collection of sound recordings using principles of several different cataloging systems.

Lastly, for my Latin American Scholarship class, I continued working on my project regarding the Guatemala National Police Archive Project.  This is a project currently underway to protect and archive approximately 80 million documents that were found in an abandoned warehouse that was once the headquarters of Guatemala’s National Police.  The National Police was a notoriously brutal institution that was involved in human rights abuses, disappearances, and torture during the country’s civil war.  The police force was disbanded in 1996, and in 2005 human rights workers happened upon the abandoned warehouse that served as their headquarters, archive, and detention center.  Human rights workers in the country have organized a large-scale project to clean, protect, and catalog the documents for analysis. Analyzing how archivists and information managers have collaborated on this project, and how they can contribute to social justice issues in general, will be an ongoing focus of mine throughout my graduate studies at UCLA.

However, now I’m relaxing in Florida and visiting family for a much needed break after finishing finals.