Reflecting on my First Year: Archives Management and Required Courses, Semester 2
Posted October 14, 2025 by Laura Kiely
In my last post I told you about the courses I took during my first semester here at Simmons SLIS. In this post I’ll discuss my second semester courses! After getting required courses out of the way, there’s a lot more wiggle room for which classes you want to take. I’m working on the Archives Management concentration, which has a more prescribed series of courses. My second semester I went from taking more general library courses to archives courses!
I rounded out my central three required courses with LIS-488, the course on technology. Now, I have mixed feelings about this class. It’s a phenomenal course for people who come in with very little computer science knowledge or background, so I figured that having only taken a couple of courses in undergrad meant I fit into this category. The good news is that I know more about computer basics than I thought! The bad news is, I did have several days in that class dedicated to information I already knew. That’s not the end of the world, but if you’re coming in with any sort of computer science background I would highly recommend opting out of LIS-488, or at least talking with Naresh Agarwal about appropriate placement. There are still plenty of opportunities to take computer and technology courses here with the more tech-focused faculty, so you won’t miss out by opting out of 488, but I do wish I’d taken LIS-485 instead and gone more in-depth on programming.
The second course in the series of three required courses for the archives management concentration is LIS-440, which felt like encoding central. I highly recommend taking LIS-415 before LIS-440, because 415 introduces some concepts of which 440 goes into detail. Kathy Wisser, who runs the archives management concentration, teaches the class, so it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the archives management concentration through chats with her. This class really gets into the nitty gritty of proper writing for finding aids, good encoding, and general information management, which isn’t my main area of interest, but I’m glad I know how to do it!
My third course this semester was Digital Stewardship. This class went into the theory on how we create and upkeep digital collections, and we used a lot of real-world examples to compare and contrast how institutions maintain their websites and online information. This class is great for people interested in museum work especially, but had some interesting thoughts about accessibility and how to make online archives repositories functional. This course is one of a list of three, Digital Stewardship, Preservation Management, and Digital Preservation, from which all archives concentrators select at least one. Because I’m interested in the more hands-on aspects of archives work, I decided to also take Preservation Management, which I am in right now, but only one of the three is required!
By my second semester here at Simmons I really started to feel like I was in the swing of things. I could see how 440 built on 415, how Digital Stewardship and 488 were connected, and was beginning to tie everything together into a complete program. Plus, now that almost all of my required courses are complete, I have a lot of freedom in my second year here to be adventurous in my classes!