Relatos Finales

I had my seminar last week and am proud of myself ‘cause I put together enough Spanish to fill up several hours in front of some twenty-five people. Three Paraguayans bailed on me, two of them the morning of, so I had to fill in for all of them. The only trouble was that it’s more enjoyable to watch several people during a seminar than listen to one. The director of the National Library and another guy who knows about digitalization also spoke. It was worth organizing, in any case, and it was nice to do a sort of capstone for the end of my trip. Disaster didn’t break out, so I reckon it was a success.

I have one more presentation this evening at the Universidad Nacional , which is going to be about index languages and thesauri. There is a bit more to it, but basically librarians use them to control what terms can be used to index documents and increase the quality of searches. I am still not too sure what I am going to talk about, but have a bunch of slides and so am going to ask at the beginning what people want to hear about. I created one for Stael’s institute library over a few months—in English, mind ya—and they will be able to use it to describe the collection that they have there. Also, we are trying to move the data from one catalog system to the other and have been cleaning up the records for the last couple of days. Copy and paste and find and replace have never been so useful! I am not really the most expert person on the subject, but as I have said before, American credentials go a long way in Asunción. Perhaps I’ll suffer from a bit of a Napoleon complex once I get back to the States!

There has been some interesting activity on fellow blogs, and I love keeping up with them. I prefer this new way of keeping a social website like Myspace or Facebook, since the owner has to put more intellectual effort into it and actually come up with something interesting to say to the world. I especially admire those who find things in regular life to write about and post, where there aren’t such simply identifiable word-generating events. I experienced some withdrawal without posts on Tour de Homerpearl, which was quite enjoyable reading and substituted for the lack of telephone contact with my parents. I go back once in a while to see if there might be some writing adventure they’ve started and haven’t gotten the change to tell me.

Craaazy that in just over a week from today I depart for the States—all of the preparation, moving, hesitation about whether I wanted to go—and the whole thing is now coming to a close. A great time it has been, and I am glad that I’ve been able to share some of it with the readers out there. One of the best things about it is that I don’t have to start from scratch when telling all about what I did while in Paraguay! Look forward to seeing everyone and glad to hear of so many upcoming changes for several folks and one that I'm thinkin’ of especially—best of luck to everyone and we’ll have to celebrate promptly.