Blog

As I’ve been in library school, I’ve become more aware of disability and the need for accessibility. Some of this came when I suffered a severe injury that put me on disability leave for a month. I had to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to write my assignments and papers for school and Siri to tweet for me. The full healing process took a whole year and I found myself coping with inaccessible doors, etc. There was a point where we were unsure if the injury would heal and I had to accept that I might spend the rest of my life without most of the use of my arms.

After having worked on it for the last 7 months or so, I’ve finally finished creating EADiva, a site which functions as a friendlier version of the EAD tag library. In my introductory post on its blog, I note that this isn’t a replacement for the Library of Congress’s tag library or excellent resources.

I used the resources from the Library of Congress to create to create the site, although many examples are my own. Each page links to its comparable Library of Congress page. However, the site has inter-linking between element pages, cutting way down on navigation time, and spells out each attribute on the pages themselves instead of requiring the user to click over to other navigation pages.

In LBSC 605, Intro to Archives, I did a literature review of articles on blog archival. I found so little that dealt with actual blogging that I had to expand it to blogs and dynamic websites. It was a bit disappointing, but preparing that review reminded me of a little blog that I wanted to save.

The Blog

In the fall of 2004, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. One of her many concerns became the preservation of family stories, mostly the ones she’d told us as kids or the ones which had been told her by older relatives who were already gone. At my sister’s suggestion, she began blogging the stories in early 2005 using Xanga.

Wednesday, the 27th, is the one year anniversary of losing my mom. It’s been a rough year for our family, but we’ve made it through. I’m no longer crying regularly…so that’s an improvement, right?

Last November 16th, I donated hematopoetic stem cells (the stem cells that form bone marrow–adult stem cells) to a man with MDS whose best chance of surviving was a stem cell transplant. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year now. Last I heard from the program, he was still alive. Now that it’s been a year, I have a chance of learning his name, maybe even meeting him!

Back in college, the National Marrow Donor Program did a drive on campus. I have to admit, I was not in a healthy frame of mind when I signed up. I’d found out that my mother was going to die. I was depressed. I wasn’t still suicidal at that point, but I was extremely sad. Bone marrow transplants weren’t what could save her, but I signed up thinking that death was so horrible and maybe I could save someone. It’s actually not a bad way of looking at it—we can’t always save the ones we love, but sometimes we can help other people. (It’s even easier to sign up now…they just need a cheek swab and can even send you a kit in the mail.)

On Sunday afternoon, I got out of the shower to find Micah waiting for me. “Your dad called,” he said, “It sounds important. Call him back.” When I called my dad, he told me that the nurses said I should come home. They thought Mom had days, it was possible she had a week or two, but I should probably come home now.

Fortunately, I’d saved up leave time and I’d talked to my bosses about the possibility that I might be called away suddenly. So heading up on Sunday night wasn’t a problem, I just called one to let her know and sent a more detailed e-mail later on to get things worked out.