I have two key attributes that will help me in future jobs. First, I am flexible, ready to accept changes, and eager to work towards them. Second, I intend to continue learning for the rest of my life. Together, these two traits will ensure that I can utilize future technologies and work with a variety of different coworkers and patrons.
Throughout the semester, I have gained a deeper understanding of the different roles that an LIS professional plays. There is a lot more to the job than choosing books, cataloging them, shelving them, and helping patrons find them, and that's wonderful! I look forward to a job where I get to do many different things every day.
From here I am ready to continue taking classes and work hard outside them to get more experience. I currently have a job as a library page, and while that does constitute library experience, it is not the experience that I am trying to get. I plan on being more active within student organizations so that I can gain skills in digitization and metadata even before I have the opportunity to take classes that focus on those skills.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Revisit Assumptions/Assertions about LIS
My original assertions were fairly broad and still hold true. Well, except for the first one that was proved wrong before I even posted it.
Over the course of the semester I have become more sure that technology is an asset to the LIS field. The people who are attempting to resist the changes that technology brings are probably already having a difficult time and will certainly have difficulties in the future. The increase in access and searchability is what makes information much more user friendly today. Throughout the semester I have become more aware of different technologies and their uses inside and outside of the library. This has helped me decide what classes will be most important for me to take in future semesters and what skills I need to work on in my own time.
I have also learned about the many different paths that a librarian/information scientist can take. The opportunities that I had to meet with librarians one-on-one were particularly helpful because I was able to learn about the problems that different libraries face and how people have chosen to tackle them.
LIS 6010 was a great introduction to the information profession because I learned enough to understand how much I still don't know.
Over the course of the semester I have become more sure that technology is an asset to the LIS field. The people who are attempting to resist the changes that technology brings are probably already having a difficult time and will certainly have difficulties in the future. The increase in access and searchability is what makes information much more user friendly today. Throughout the semester I have become more aware of different technologies and their uses inside and outside of the library. This has helped me decide what classes will be most important for me to take in future semesters and what skills I need to work on in my own time.
I have also learned about the many different paths that a librarian/information scientist can take. The opportunities that I had to meet with librarians one-on-one were particularly helpful because I was able to learn about the problems that different libraries face and how people have chosen to tackle them.
LIS 6010 was a great introduction to the information profession because I learned enough to understand how much I still don't know.
Technology Sandbox
I love technology and social networking, but if you are going to do it at all you have to do it well. An abandoned social networking profile is a sad thing to stumble across, it shows that someone tried for a little while, and then, for whatever reason, gave up. I think one common reason that people give up is that they feel that they don't have enough followers, likes, retweets, mentions, page views, or whatever other way influence is measured. At some point you have to just keep going, when someone does find your blog you want them to get lost in 10, 20, or 50 posts that have them interested enough that they don't realize that they just wasted an hour scrolling through your photos or text posts.
My favorite social networks are Twitter and Tumblr. I like having the ability to follow the people and topics that are most interesting to me and having them all show up in one place (or in this case, two places). I use these websites almost every day, sometimes from my desktop computer, but more often from the apps on my iPhone. There are a few other sites that have a similar type of feed or dashboard that brings together information from people you follow, Facebook does to some extent, and I believe that Instagram and Vine do as well.
I think the most important thing for information agencies to do is to figure out where their patrons are spending time online. It is also important to try to understand the etiquette of each social network. That may seem like a silly word to be using because most social networking interactions are so informal, but it is worth thinking about. This isn't something to stress about, but I suggest spending some time clicking around and reading through posts on different sites to get a feel for the language, humor, and hashtags that are used.
There may be an overwhelming number of social networks that library patrons are using, but that's okay. The best thing about this technology is that it allows you to cross post things. Maybe someone in the library is really comfortable with Tumblr, well every time the library's Tumblr is updated a notification can automatically be posted on Twitter. There are more connections like this than you would expect, poke around in the settings of each site and see what you find. This allows you to reach more people on more networks with little to no more effort.
An important thing to remember when sharing things is that most of these sites encourage users to repost other people's posts. Take advantage of this, it will make you so much more interesting! Maybe Buzzfeed posted a list of their favorite books of the year and you happen to have several in the library. Share it! Maybe the Nightly News had a great report about the library is Ferguson. Share it! Maybe something inspirational happened in your town, but it has nothing to do with the library. Go ahead, share it! Don't take blogging too seriously, if you find something fascinating/funny/informative, chances are someone else will like it too. I wouldn't advise posting 100 things every day, but it you think something would be interesting to your followers, you should share it.
With complete freedom I would use several social networking sites to digitize the collection I was working with and share it with as many people as possible. I would primarily save images on Flickr because of the large amount of space they offer and the system for organizing visual information. From there I would post at least one thing every day on a Tumblr blog, Today's Document from the National Archives has a great format to emulate. I would also share these posts through Twitter and use Twitter to interact with individuals and institutions. I might use Facebook to make people aware of events and share photos after the events. Finally, I might try Pinterest to curate specific sets of content, but only if I had enough time.
My favorite social networks are Twitter and Tumblr. I like having the ability to follow the people and topics that are most interesting to me and having them all show up in one place (or in this case, two places). I use these websites almost every day, sometimes from my desktop computer, but more often from the apps on my iPhone. There are a few other sites that have a similar type of feed or dashboard that brings together information from people you follow, Facebook does to some extent, and I believe that Instagram and Vine do as well.
I think the most important thing for information agencies to do is to figure out where their patrons are spending time online. It is also important to try to understand the etiquette of each social network. That may seem like a silly word to be using because most social networking interactions are so informal, but it is worth thinking about. This isn't something to stress about, but I suggest spending some time clicking around and reading through posts on different sites to get a feel for the language, humor, and hashtags that are used.
There may be an overwhelming number of social networks that library patrons are using, but that's okay. The best thing about this technology is that it allows you to cross post things. Maybe someone in the library is really comfortable with Tumblr, well every time the library's Tumblr is updated a notification can automatically be posted on Twitter. There are more connections like this than you would expect, poke around in the settings of each site and see what you find. This allows you to reach more people on more networks with little to no more effort.
An important thing to remember when sharing things is that most of these sites encourage users to repost other people's posts. Take advantage of this, it will make you so much more interesting! Maybe Buzzfeed posted a list of their favorite books of the year and you happen to have several in the library. Share it! Maybe the Nightly News had a great report about the library is Ferguson. Share it! Maybe something inspirational happened in your town, but it has nothing to do with the library. Go ahead, share it! Don't take blogging too seriously, if you find something fascinating/funny/informative, chances are someone else will like it too. I wouldn't advise posting 100 things every day, but it you think something would be interesting to your followers, you should share it.
With complete freedom I would use several social networking sites to digitize the collection I was working with and share it with as many people as possible. I would primarily save images on Flickr because of the large amount of space they offer and the system for organizing visual information. From there I would post at least one thing every day on a Tumblr blog, Today's Document from the National Archives has a great format to emulate. I would also share these posts through Twitter and use Twitter to interact with individuals and institutions. I might use Facebook to make people aware of events and share photos after the events. Finally, I might try Pinterest to curate specific sets of content, but only if I had enough time.
Following a Professional Listserv
ArLiSNAP is a newsletter for Art Library Students & New ARLIS Professionals
Each weekly newsletter is divided into 5 main parts: Announcements, Discussions, Articles this Week, New Job Postings, and a calendar of upcoming events
The most useful portion of this newsletter is undoubtedly the New Job Postings section. Every week, between two and ten jobs are listed from across the United States and Canada. While I won't be qualified for any of these jobs for a few years, it is helpful to see where jobs are available and what the requirements are.
I expected the Discussions section, which links to a brief article on a webpage that has a comments section, to be a great place to learn about new problems in the field and discuss potential solutions. As it turns out, there are very few topics, the same one may be repeated for several weeks, and most of them don't have any comments. That being said, the Art, Cultural Heritage, and Law post is very interesting and makes me want to learn more about it. I know that Wayne has a one-credit course about Copy write law, but I'm not sure if we have anything else. I agree with the writer that there might not be space in LIS programs to adequately cover this topic. A student group seems like it would be the natural next step, but I'm not sure how easy that would be to coordinate because of all the intricacies of law. I usually hate being the first person to respond to something, but I might have to try to get a conversation going.
Blogging about Professional Blogs
I spent quite a bit of time choosing blogs to follow for this post and was surprised by how difficult it was to find bloggers working in museum libraries. Archivists are a bit easier to find, but the majority of blogs still seem to be about school libraries, public libraries, and academic libraries.
Overall, it was interesting to see the different approaches people take to blogging about librarianship. Some strictly stick to issues surrounding librarianship, some mix in current events and personal feelings, and others include posts about completely unrelated topics. There seem to be as many blogging styles as there are types of librarians.
The first blog that I followed is Archivist Rising. Marian Matyn has been an archivist for over 20 years and currently works at Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library. She updates her blog quite frequently and most of her posts are about news articles that relate to archives/libraries in some way. Some posts are about documents that have recently surfaced or been authenticated, others are about privacy, and a few are about exhibits or auctions that have taken place. It is a nice assortment of articles that might not make the nightly news, but are still worth reading about. This shows how important it is to keep up with current events, even if it isn't about advances in technology. I particularly appreciate when this blog, and many others, post job openings. Jobs can be hard to track down because they are posted in so many different places, it is nice to see that bloggers are looking out for their fellow professionals.
Instead of focusing on a single blog for this next part, I'm going to share a few individual posts that directly relate to museum librarianship.
The post So, You Want to be a Museum Librarian? on the blog Letters to a Young Librarian is a particularly great post that concisely sums up some key points to consider. (And it's written by Detroiter!) Many of the points that Kristin makes directly relate back to things that I learned while doing my library visits earlier this semester. The idea of one-person libraries comes up again, with a reminder that in that situation a librarian has to do everything. Kristin does a great job of explaining all the hard work that goes into being a museum librarian, but she still makes it sound fun and rewarding.
The blog Hack Library School has a great post about preparing for a degree in art librarianship. It discusses organizations that are worth joining, schools that offer dual-degree programs and what to do if your school doesn't. The post is very general, but it can be a good jumping off point.
Finally, the blog Future Art Librarian is written by a student with the aspirations of working in a museum library. While she isn't a professional with that type of experience to share, it is nice to read about someone who is on a similar path.
Overall, it was interesting to see the different approaches people take to blogging about librarianship. Some strictly stick to issues surrounding librarianship, some mix in current events and personal feelings, and others include posts about completely unrelated topics. There seem to be as many blogging styles as there are types of librarians.
The first blog that I followed is Archivist Rising. Marian Matyn has been an archivist for over 20 years and currently works at Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library. She updates her blog quite frequently and most of her posts are about news articles that relate to archives/libraries in some way. Some posts are about documents that have recently surfaced or been authenticated, others are about privacy, and a few are about exhibits or auctions that have taken place. It is a nice assortment of articles that might not make the nightly news, but are still worth reading about. This shows how important it is to keep up with current events, even if it isn't about advances in technology. I particularly appreciate when this blog, and many others, post job openings. Jobs can be hard to track down because they are posted in so many different places, it is nice to see that bloggers are looking out for their fellow professionals.
Instead of focusing on a single blog for this next part, I'm going to share a few individual posts that directly relate to museum librarianship.
The post So, You Want to be a Museum Librarian? on the blog Letters to a Young Librarian is a particularly great post that concisely sums up some key points to consider. (And it's written by Detroiter!) Many of the points that Kristin makes directly relate back to things that I learned while doing my library visits earlier this semester. The idea of one-person libraries comes up again, with a reminder that in that situation a librarian has to do everything. Kristin does a great job of explaining all the hard work that goes into being a museum librarian, but she still makes it sound fun and rewarding.
The blog Hack Library School has a great post about preparing for a degree in art librarianship. It discusses organizations that are worth joining, schools that offer dual-degree programs and what to do if your school doesn't. The post is very general, but it can be a good jumping off point.
Finally, the blog Future Art Librarian is written by a student with the aspirations of working in a museum library. While she isn't a professional with that type of experience to share, it is nice to read about someone who is on a similar path.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Popcorn & A Movie
To start, I just want to say how much I enjoyed The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians through Film. It covered several serious topics while still retaining a sense of humor and making librarianship an appealing field. Many of the featured movie clips were a bit too old for me to recognize, (my knowledge of movies from before the 90s is embarrassingly small) but it was interesting to see how the perception of librarians has (or really hasn't) changed since the 50s and 60s.
What is a library? What is a librarian?
Librarians and libraries exist to connect people with the information that they want and need. As we have discussed in class many times, libraries about about people, not books. The movie did a great job of showing how much goes into librarianship that largely goes unnoticed. Librarians run businesses, they facilitate fundraising efforts, they fight for freedom, they teach people to read, they help people learn English, They work with doctors to save lives, they connect with people who feel like outsiders. Librarians advocate for positive change and act to help the underdogs. Even though librarians do all of these things, and more, Hollywood mainly depicts them as pretty but stern women who sit behind desks and check out books or walk through the aisles to reshelve books while wearing heels and a pencil skirt. Oh, and don't forget, a librarian's hair should always be in a bun! The Music Man depicts Hollywood's view of librarians perfectly, or at least the musical number "Marian The Librarian" does, I can't judge the rest of the movie because I haven't seen it. Because librarians help the public, it seems that men think it is okay to bother and harass them while they are trying to do their jobs. I understand that this is a musical and it is supposed to be over-the-top, but the dramatic choreography and rhyming lyrics do not take away from the fact this type of behavior is unacceptable. Even though this movie was released 52 years ago, incidents like these still happen today. A library in the Detroit area recently had to add more security cameras because a man spent over a hour following one of the female pages around and asking for her phone number.
What points did Seidl make that were most provocative to you?
It would be easy to believe that librarianship is an ideal field in which women will be treated equally to their male counterparts because it is a field that is predominantly populated by women. This is done most obviously when Seidl discusses Melville Dewey and his horrible attitude towards women, in a clip from Party Girl a character says that he "hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require an intelligence. That means it's underpaid and undervalued!" This is particularly apparent at the library I work at, where most of the librarians are forced to work part time because the city does not want to pay for their healthcare. Some of the librarians split their time between three different libraries so they can work enough hours. This divide is particularly astounding when compared with the pay and benefits that are given to other professionals, like doctors and lawyer, who are working in fields that were dominated by men for so long.
What do you see as the most important role an LIS professional plays in society?
I think this question is really difficult because of all of the different types of libraries and the different communities that they exist in. The needs of each library are different based on the community that it is a part of. That being said, all librarians connect patrons to the information that they are trying to find. This ability to sort through vast numbers of books, articles, services, and webpages to find what a user is looking for is what keeps people coming back to libraries. As Neil Gaiman says, "Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one."
What is a library? What is a librarian?
Librarians and libraries exist to connect people with the information that they want and need. As we have discussed in class many times, libraries about about people, not books. The movie did a great job of showing how much goes into librarianship that largely goes unnoticed. Librarians run businesses, they facilitate fundraising efforts, they fight for freedom, they teach people to read, they help people learn English, They work with doctors to save lives, they connect with people who feel like outsiders. Librarians advocate for positive change and act to help the underdogs. Even though librarians do all of these things, and more, Hollywood mainly depicts them as pretty but stern women who sit behind desks and check out books or walk through the aisles to reshelve books while wearing heels and a pencil skirt. Oh, and don't forget, a librarian's hair should always be in a bun! The Music Man depicts Hollywood's view of librarians perfectly, or at least the musical number "Marian The Librarian" does, I can't judge the rest of the movie because I haven't seen it. Because librarians help the public, it seems that men think it is okay to bother and harass them while they are trying to do their jobs. I understand that this is a musical and it is supposed to be over-the-top, but the dramatic choreography and rhyming lyrics do not take away from the fact this type of behavior is unacceptable. Even though this movie was released 52 years ago, incidents like these still happen today. A library in the Detroit area recently had to add more security cameras because a man spent over a hour following one of the female pages around and asking for her phone number.
What points did Seidl make that were most provocative to you?
It would be easy to believe that librarianship is an ideal field in which women will be treated equally to their male counterparts because it is a field that is predominantly populated by women. This is done most obviously when Seidl discusses Melville Dewey and his horrible attitude towards women, in a clip from Party Girl a character says that he "hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require an intelligence. That means it's underpaid and undervalued!" This is particularly apparent at the library I work at, where most of the librarians are forced to work part time because the city does not want to pay for their healthcare. Some of the librarians split their time between three different libraries so they can work enough hours. This divide is particularly astounding when compared with the pay and benefits that are given to other professionals, like doctors and lawyer, who are working in fields that were dominated by men for so long.
What do you see as the most important role an LIS professional plays in society?
I think this question is really difficult because of all of the different types of libraries and the different communities that they exist in. The needs of each library are different based on the community that it is a part of. That being said, all librarians connect patrons to the information that they are trying to find. This ability to sort through vast numbers of books, articles, services, and webpages to find what a user is looking for is what keeps people coming back to libraries. As Neil Gaiman says, "Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one."
Mid-Semester Analysis and Reflection
I've always found it difficult to put my thoughts into words, even as I'm writing this post it feels strange and a bit unnatural to be keeping a blog. Over the years I've become accustomed to formal research paper writing, but the informal nature of a blog is not entirely within my comfort zone. I think some of my trepidation comes from the openness of the internet, these words can be read by anyone and may last for a very long time, past when my personal views may have changed. I have always been more of a listener than a talker, which is making my classes a bit more challenging because one requires quite a bit of online work and the other is completely online. On online forums it is difficult to show active listening, unless you have a strong response what a classmate has posted.
That being said, I have enjoys the Think Tank activities that we have done online. It is helpful for me when theoretical topics that have discussed in class are joined with real world examples. Groups have done a good job of making these connections and providing relevant discussion questions. Sometimes it is difficult to come into a conversation near the end where several people have already come to the same conclusions, I've never been keen on reiterating points that have already been made clear. I need to work on being involved in these discussions more towards the beginning of the week, both so that I can start conversations and so that people have time to respond to them. These activities are my favorite because they allow us to bring together lecture material, reading material, and real world experiences while considering current problems and solutions.
As the semester has progressed I have become more and more interested in museum librarianship. I'm not sure if this is reflected in my posts because it has always been an interest of mine, but it is coming more to the forefront now.
That being said, I have enjoys the Think Tank activities that we have done online. It is helpful for me when theoretical topics that have discussed in class are joined with real world examples. Groups have done a good job of making these connections and providing relevant discussion questions. Sometimes it is difficult to come into a conversation near the end where several people have already come to the same conclusions, I've never been keen on reiterating points that have already been made clear. I need to work on being involved in these discussions more towards the beginning of the week, both so that I can start conversations and so that people have time to respond to them. These activities are my favorite because they allow us to bring together lecture material, reading material, and real world experiences while considering current problems and solutions.
As the semester has progressed I have become more and more interested in museum librarianship. I'm not sure if this is reflected in my posts because it has always been an interest of mine, but it is coming more to the forefront now.
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