skills
When to Stop
Posted October 1, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
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
Posted September 18, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
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…
Who Knew Fidelity Investments has a Library?
Posted September 6, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Hello, Student Snippet readers! Long time no see(read?)! Happy start of the new semester, I have had one of the busiest summers of my life this year. For a quick recap: I had to put my on-campus job in the SLIS admissions office on hold since I was working at Fidelity Investments full-time as their Research Services Intern, while also taking Metadata online which was offered this summer as the SLIS travel course to Yonsei University in South Korea! Since I could write about my trip to South Korea for ages, I thought I’d focus my first “back-to-school” blog post, on my internship this summer. I found and applied for my summer internship using the SLIS jobline. I was fortunate enough interview, and be offered the internship at Fidelity Investments in Boston, where I would be working with their research services team. Now I’m sure I am not alone in that I had no idea that Fidelity even had a library, and with it some super cool librarians! Because it was a corporate library, the…
Adventures in Reference
Posted July 16, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
It’s week 5 and I still haven’t gotten the hang of how fast summer courses go by. Including this week, there are only three weeks left in the semester. *takes a few deep, calming breaths.* How did that happen? Basically, because all I’ve been focusing on is my schoolwork and how to get everything done on time without cramming. I’ve been keeping a very regular study schedule so that I don’t get behind. When I get home from work, I eat, then do school work, and on the weekends, I spend a lot of time finishing up projects. There really is no time to procrastinate or take a break, and the time has gone by in a blur. But, I am loving both of my classes and have learned a ton already. I’m particularly enjoying LIS 407, Information Sources and Services. It’s all about reference services–basically, teaching us how to search more efficiently and effectively. We’ve learned many searching strategies, including how to combine those techniques to broaden or narrow our results, and how to…
Finding and Landing a Summer Internship
Posted June 7, 2019 by Maria Reilova
I had been worried about finding another job or internship over the summer months since I knew that I was going to be staying in Boston the whole time and did not want to just laze about until my South Korea trip. To be honest I was applying to almost every viable job that was popping up on Jobline. I was lucky enough to be asked to interview for 3 positions at 3 very different libraries. It was a hectic fews weeks in terms of every job I applied for emailing me at the same time, while I was also dealing with my general classes and internship deadlines, in addition to also preparing for a trip home to run the Star Wars 5k at Disney World! It was a lot to handle, but I somehow made it through with only slight strain on my sleep schedule (it is always those 5am flights that are the cheapest unfortunately). Which leads to my big news, everyone…I scored my first job in a real library! This is huge…
Changing Direction
Posted April 1, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to when I was applying to college for the first time. I had several conversations with my dad that went like this: DAD: You should major in computer science! ME: Ugh, no! I’m artsy, not techy! My dad is a computer engineer (happily retired now, although still the go-to computer troubleshooter for everyone in our large extended family), and he wanted me to major in something useful that could get me a job after graduation. I, on the other hand, wanted to major in something that I enjoyed, like history and writing. I majored in art history and ended up working at an accounting firm, which was not what I was expecting, but I have no regrets. I’m bringing this up because I had a full-circle moment last week. I decided to switch out of the archives concentration and into a design your own concentration focusing on…drumroll please…computers. Specifically, my focus is going to be on digitalization, digital libraries, and programming. …
Mind Over Metadata
Posted March 28, 2019 by Megan Ondricek
Okay, okay I’ve been dying to use that phrase for a while, and now I finally have a blog post worthy of it! My metadata class has really been picking up speed and intensity. It seems like every week is a new standard to learn. So far we’ve done Dublin Core, XML (more of a markup language than a metadata standard), Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and design-your-own metadata schema. And we’re just over halfway through the semester! I figured I would learn a lot about metadata in this class: what it is, what it does, how to use it, how to create it, etc. What I did not figure was how much coding and actual metadata creation we’d be doing. It’s a lot. Do not take this class if you do not enjoy coding! Fortunately, I do enjoy coding. It is something I never thought about before library school and now feel pretty comfortable with. For those of you who either want to do lots of coding or want to…
Library Instruction: What I’ve Learned
Posted March 21, 2019 by Megan Ondricek
Last week I had my final “big” teaching day at the internship: a packed morning with three classes in a row. I’ve now taught the same lesson to eight unique sections belonging to four unique faculty members. While I in no way consider myself an expert, I do feel qualified at this point to talk about some of the big things I’ve learned through this experience. 1. It’s okay to be nervous. Experiencing nerves does not mean that you are doing something wrong or are not up to the task ahead. I’ve heard from several experienced instructors that they still routinely get nervous. For me, my nerves generally fade away once the class is underway and I get into the “flow” of the lesson, but they can still show up again at seemingly random moments. 2. Every class is different. Even though I had the same lesson material for eight classes, each one turned out a little different. I asked different questions, said different things, and spent more or less time on certain parts of…
Group Project Musings
Posted March 19, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
There’s some weight off my shoulders this week because I finished my first group project. It wasn’t just my first group project at Simmons, it was my first graduate level group project ever! I was pretty nervous about it. Since I’m taking the class online, I had no idea how we’d choose partners or topics or how we’d actually work together. But everything went surprisingly smoothly. The project was for my tech class, and we had to create a tutorial on a new app or program. Choosing groups ended up being easy because we chose by topic and proceeded from there. I chose to work on the Raspberry Pi, which is an inexpensive little computer that you can use to learn coding and other programming skills (if you want to check it out, you can go to the website www.raspberrypi.org It is really fun!). Our first assignment as a group was to fill out a Team Contract. This was extremely helpful because it forced us to think about all the logistics of group work: how…
Developing and Managing Collection Development and Management
Posted March 11, 2019 by Katie Carlson
I, Katie Carlson, am a ‘microwave thinker.’ This idea was introduced to me by a professor at Mount Holyoke, and indicates that given a moment, I can always supply an idea. Put simply, my brain moves fast. (Sometimes too fast – especially when the goal is quality over quantity.) Microwave thinkers are placed in opposition to ‘slow cooker thinkers.’ These are people who need time to let their ideas marinate, especially before they feel comfortable sharing them with a group. A round table discussion can be torture for these ‘slow cookers,’ especially when the room is populated with ‘microwaves.’ While I originally responded negatively to being a ‘microwave’ — thinking of unevenly heated food with weird textures — my professor stressed that one brand of thinking is not better or worse than the other! We landed on the idea that in any educational setting, it’s important to plan activities and allow for opportunities that work well for both ‘slow cookers’ and ‘microwaves.’ The reason I bring up this ‘thinker’ dichotomy is that…