Student Snippets A Window Into The Daily Life & Thoughts of SLIS Students

skills

Super Statistics

Did you know that the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners keeps detailed statistics on every single public library in the state?  Or that the MBLC collects and analyzes all of these statistics and makes them available online in spreadsheet format?  I found this out while I was completing an assignment for Collections Development.  The assignment was to evaluate our library’s collection using standard evaluation methods, like list checking, peer comparison, user surveys, and statistics analysis.  I chose to do a peer evaluation of my library and used the MBLC statistics to compare it to two neighboring libraries.  It was really interesting to see how each library spends money and how their collection makeup differed.  But it was also overwhelming because there are so many statistics.  It bears repeating:  there are so many statistics.  Want to know how many study rooms a library has?  Or the most recent year your library was renovated?  Check out the Main Facilities spreadsheet.  How about total materials expenditures and per capita rate of spending?  Check out the Financial Data spreadsheet. …


Networking 101

I used to hate networking. I’m very much an introvert and even though I’ve worked on it and have gotten to know my introversion better I still sometimes struggle too. However, networking has allowed me to not be as intimidated as I once was by what I felt were “fancy people in the field”. Furthermore, it has landed me grants, scholarships, job interviews, and most importantly colleagues from around the world. I go to a lot of conferences and I do quite a lot of online networking too mostly through email lists, Facebook support groups, and just reaching out to people I would like to be in contact with. Sometimes I even cold email people! As a result I know my fair share of people in the field. OnceI forgot about someone I had connected with and they walked up to me excited to “finally meet the music librarian from Simmons”. I’m sure my face was worth a million!  Because of this, I constantly get asked on how I do it and how I’ve put…


Working in an Archive

For LIS 438-Intro to Archival Methods, one of the required aspects is a 60-hour internship with an archive. For the class, Simmons helps you find an archive that will work well for your own situation based on your interests, transportation options, and where you live. I was assigned to work in the City of Boston Archives and Records Management Division with SLIS alum, Marta Crilly. For my internship, I was introduced to all of the other archivists within the office and they were all Simmons alumni which was really cool because it made me see just how big the alumni network is for SLIS. The City of Boston Archives has all the governmental records for the various divisions within the government like the fire department, police, and obviously the mayor’s office. My project for this semester will be going through boxes of photos from Mayor Raymond Flynn’s administration from 1984 to 1993 which had previously had been digitized onto a Flickr account. Over the course of the 60 hours I’ll be working there, I’ll be…


Mastering Metadata

One of the most interesting things about metadata is that there is a big difference between reading about metadata and creating metadata. I learned a little about this last year when we covered the topic briefly in LIS 415, but I’m learning a lot more about it now. The readings make metadata creation seem straightforward, but when I try to complete my assignments, I often get stuck. There is so much to think about, and so many categories to cover. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out if I’ve covered all the possible information I need to for a particular item.  For example, this week we have to create our own metadata schema to describe three different music albums. We don’t have to describe the albums yet, just come up with all the categories necessary to describe them. The starting point is the album cover and back, which includes information such as the title of the album, the artist and other contributors, and the song titles. There can also be information on the producer(s), the studio…


Building Blocks

One of the things I love about my classes at Simmons is that they build on each other.  It’s exciting when a topic I learned about in one class is referenced or expanded on in a different class.  It’s fascinating to go more in depth on certain topics and to see how they tie together.  Even though this semester is only three weeks old, it has already referenced a lot of what was covered in my previous semesters.   Collections Development has built on many of the subjects covered by Introduction to Management (LIS 404).  This includes types of budgets used by libraries, how those budgets are used, mission statements, and vision statements.  It has also mentioned environmental scanning, which is a topic that came up in Digital Libraries (LIS 462).  Environmental scanning entails keeping track of what similar libraries are doing in order to measure what your library is or is not doing, and what it can do in the future.  It’s a way of staying competitive and relevant in the community.    Metadata has…


End of Semester Thoughts

I can’t believe the semester is over already!  I have completed all my assignments except for a group project, but that is 90% done and will be submitted by the time this blog is posted.  I’m happy that I made it through unscathed, and I’m also happy that I won’t ever have to take three classes in one semester again.  It was doable, but definitely required a lot of focus and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had forgotten about an assignment (I never did, but I also constantly checked my syllabi to make sure I was covered!).  I will be glad to get back to only two classes next semester. I think the biggest lesson I learned from my classes this semester was how broad the field of librarianship really is.  The Digital Libraries course expanded my concept of what a library is and showed me how much work goes into setting up a digital library.  It requires a lot of people from different areas to work together to provide something functional and…


Happy (almost) Halloween!

Happy (almost) Halloween everyone!  You know, I really think time seems to fly by much faster when you are in school.  During the short breaks between classes, time goes so slowly but now it feels like just yesterday we were starting classes, and now it’s almost Halloween.  So we’re starting Week 9 of the Fall 2019 semester this week!  This week we’re focusing on Evaluating Information Services, which is a really important topic, and it’s really interesting too.  I’ve been excited for this week since I saw it on the syllabus–the library I work at did a Library Experience Survey last spring, and hearing about it and the methodology behind it has made me really interested in evaluation.  Every library does evaluation and it’s really been interesting to learn more about this topic, and I think I’m definitely going to add LIS 403: Evaluating Information Services to the list of classes I want to take before I graduate. This class has been really interesting so far!  Some of the other topics we’ve learned about include…


Putting Theory into Practice: Tackling Information Literacy for Incarcerated Students

One of the components for my Information Services for Diverse Users class (LIS 410) this semester is a service learning project. I did a lot of community based learning in undergrad, so this was right up my alley! I signed up to work with the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College (TUPIT), which brights Tufts faculty and students “together with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, corrections staff, educators, and scholars of criminal justice to facilitate creative and collaborative responses to the problems of mass incarceration.” Because I have a background in restorative justice and a vested interest in the rights of the incarcerated, getting to combine these passions with my library studies was a dream come true! This past Friday, I was able to meet with my project supervisor to get a better idea of what our goals are for the semester.   As it turns out, we will be creating an annotated bibliography and miniature lit review on the subject of education and information literacy in prisons, as well as the book to prison…


When to Stop

I had a very busy weekend.  I finished most of my digital libraries project and I am very happy with it.  The only thing I haven’t done is write up my annotated bibliography, but that shouldn’t take too long.  I also spent a lot of time on an assignment for my programming course, which I was not expecting.  We have a lab and an assignment each week, and they both take time, but nothing like this.  I simply could not get my code to work.  I spent more than two hours just on the first question.  I tried over and over to make it work.  I changed my names, variables, punctuation, formulae, and it still didn’t work the way it was supposed to.  It was almost there, but not quite, which was even more frustrating.  I decided to take a break and try next question, but I could not get that to work all the way, either.  So I put the assignment away for the day.  When I picked it up the next day, I…


Intro to Programming

I wrote a post last year explaining all the different ways that discussion happens in online classes (http://blogs.simmons.edu/slis/student-experience/2019/04/participation.html).  This semester, I have another new format for my Introduction to Programming course (LIS 485), and it relies on mainly on classmate feedback.  Each week, we have to complete a lab and an assignment.  The lab is where we practice our coding skills, and the assignment is where we answer questions and/or perform a coding task related to what we’ve learned in the lab.  It’s very similar to the format of Technology for Information Professionals (LIS 488), except that now we are required to post our work to the forums for our classmates to review.  I was pretty anxious about this at first.  In a normal class, if I mess up, I’m the only one who knows besides the professor.  With this format, there’s no secrecy.  If I struggle or have the wrong answers, everyone will know.  What if my classmates judge me for being wrong?  Thankfully, this has not been the case.  It turns out that…


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