Blogging

This assignment of keeping a blog about our thoughts on our website project has been interesting for me. I consider myself a fairly private person and I've never had my own blog and I think it goes against my nature in a way. But, I am grateful that I've tried it. I do not feel the need to express my thoughts in such a public way. For me, privately journaling and/or discussing my thoughts with the people I am close to is sufficient and comfortable. But as a librarian, there may be a time when I need to keep a professional blog, so I am glad to have a little bit more experience with it for that reason. It has also been nice to have a venue for discussing our ideas and projects with my classmates and getting comments from them about my ideas. But the part of me that tends to value genuine human interaction live and in-person over interaction through digital mediums wonders why this couldn't gave been actual discussion since we are all in an in-person course together. One could argue there wasn't the time for it, but didn't college and graduate school make time for discussion and participation in the past before such technology?

Colors

I enjoyed our brief discussion about colors and design for the web last week. I think that will be a really fun part of this project, designing the look of the web page and choosing the color scheme. It seems like there are many cool tools on the web to help with this, which will be fun to take advantage of. I like simple design for webpages, as most of us all do now, and I also like the use of mainly black and white. Briar Press is designed that way, so perhaps I should avoid being too stylistically similar.....

Buying a press

I'm still thinking about various ways to narrow down my website topic of letterpress printing. I've thought about focusing on regional information/printers/presses and also on community print shops and how to open and run one, and now I am also considering writing about various types of presses and how and where to purchase presses. This kind of guide to buying a press would be really fun and useful for me as I have been wanting to find my own press for a long time now, and one of the aspects I like so much about letterpress printing is the presses themselves and learning how to operate these huge antiquated machines. But I don't know that much about purchasing a press and what to look for, so this would take considerable research. Though it would be research that I personally want to do someday regardless of this class, so maybe it would be useful to do it now for this website project.

Community print shop

Although I think I have settled on the topic of letterpress printing for my final website project, I’m still thinking about the particular focus or angle I want for the website and that is the harder part for me. I’m also still tempted by another idea of a website listing and reviewing all the primarily vegetarian and vegan restaurants in Philly, but I saw that various people in the past in this class have already done this and I’m not sure that I have the time and money to try out certain restaurants I’ve never been to all in the next month or so. I’m also afraid it will just be sad to discover that there aren’t more in Philly that I haven’t already tried. And I just noticed that somebody did their website all on vegetarian hoagies in Philadelphia, which is the most brilliant idea! So I have to give up in this arena.

I think I need to stay with my other initial idea of letterpress printing, and start to think more about how to focus the topic regionally. Something I’ve wanted to investigate more about letterpress is how to start a community print shop here in Philly. In Olympia there is an an amazing place called Community Print, a community resource and print shop that anyone can use for free (well, I think now membership is just a small monthly fee) after they’ve taken a short proficiency, and it is volunteer run.

Topic for Final Website

During our first class meeting last week for Internet Information Resource Design, after hearing about the final project of creating a website, I immediately thought that I would like to create a website on letterpress printing.  I mentioned already letterpress printing as something I love, and it has been a hobby and area of study of mine in the past.  I would really enjoy focusing my project on letterpress printing, and I also think there could be a real need for information on this type of printing and resources for letterpress on the east coast, and in Philadelphia in particular.  

I learned all of what I know about letterpress and learned the craft in practice in Olympia, Washington, and when I moved back to Philly several years ago, it seemed there was very little letterpress activity here.  Letterpress and small presses seemed to have had a greater resurgence on the west coast than in the east, but as there is more and more small press printing happening in New York and a little in Philly and other towns in the past five to ten years, I think it could be really helpful for people to have a regional resource on this topic.  I definitely want to create a website that is useful to others, not just fulfilling the requirements of this course.  One of my hesitancies about this topic is that the website I listed in my first posting, Briar Press, is such an amazing and popular and well-regarded site for letterpress printing that whatever I create needs to perhaps have a different angle so as to not end up as just a vastly inferior version of the same....  

Introduction

Hello; my name is Abby and I'm a graduate student of Library Science at Drexel University. I am concentrating in Library and Information Services, and am interested in working in either a public or academic library. I currently work at one of the University of Pennsylvania libraries and a coffee shop in South Philly.
Some websites I enjoy viewing and using are:
UbuWeb
~links to experimental poetry, music, and film
Goodreads
~where I try to keep track of mainly the fiction and poetry I've read
Briarpress
~a great resource on one of my loves, and probably the topic for my final website project, letterpress printing