SLIS
Week 12 — Almost the End of Another Semester!
Posted November 28, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
It’s Week 12, which means there are only a few more weeks left of this busy semester. Although I do need to start planning for my elementary practicum, the semester is still manageable. I only have 2 big papers and one project left until I’m done with the fall semester! At this point, it can be a struggle to not take a nap once a day or every few days. I also need to remind myself that leaving the confines of my desk is important! Almost every day last week, I felt like I was trapping myself in my room with two big papers due and a wedding to prepare for. After feeling down on Monday and being hard on myself for doing nothing, one of my friends reminded me that I need to take time for myself. After all, we are “human beings” and not “human doings.” Some ways that I am taking time for myself is writing poetry for fun and making time to read for pleasure. Reading different YA and children’s books…
Thankful
Posted November 26, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I was struggling to find a topic for this week’s blog. I’ve been consumed with finishing year end projects and figuring out how to complete this week’s work in time because of the holiday. I won’t be able to do any work on Thursday (I’ll be too busy stuffing stuffing and pumpkin cheesecake in my face) and then I’m going away with my mom and sisters on Friday and Saturday, so those days are out, too. And then I started reminiscing about last Thanksgiving and found my topic. Because last Thanksgiving, I was just starting to get my application together to apply to SLIS. I had already figured out who to ask for references and was ready to fill out my application. I was thinking about how excited I was to possibly be starting school again, but I was also so nervous that I wouldn’t be accepted. Once I “discovered” the idea of becoming a librarian, I couldn’t think about doing anything else, and I would have been devastated if I wasn’t accepted at Simmons. …
Bits and Pieces
Posted November 19, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I thought I’d give some updates on things I’ve been working on lately! I registered for my spring classes last week. I had always planned to sign up for Metadata (LIS 445) and I did, but I was uncertain on my second class. I took an leap and signed up for Info Services for Diverse Users (LIS 410). This wasn’t on my list of classes I wanted to take, but it struck me as very interesting and worthwhile, and I’m glad I chose it. I’m excited to learn about all the ways libraries address people with different backgrounds and abilities, and what can be done in the future to make them even more inclusive. I’m really excited for it. I finished paper #2 for Social Informatics! I submitted it on Sunday even though it was due on Tuesday. It ended up coming together faster than I thought but I spent a lot of time editing. I love the editing process, particularly playing around with wording and making my sentences cleaner and clearer. I went through…
Seoul Much to Say
Posted November 15, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Now that it is starting to get colder (basically uninhabitable in this poor Floridian’s mind), I wanted to take the time and reflect back on warmer summer days. You guessed it, it’s finally time for my long-awaited South Korea blog post! Just as a little refresher, I was lucky enough to travel to Seoul, South Korea, this past summer as part of Simmons partnership with Yonsei University. Six other Simmons students and I took the long haul flight to Korea as part of our summer Metadata course taught by Jeff Pomerantz. We were in Seoul for a little over two weeks and we tried to cram as much as we could in those two weeks! From gorging ourselves on all the delicious food, hiking up a mountain every night to our dorm, and dragging my fellow travelers on several skincare focused shopping adventures, this was an unforgettable experience that I will be jumping at the opportunity to talk about for the rest of my life. I have always been someone interested in traveling so when…
End of the Semester is Coming!
Posted November 14, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
It’s getting to the end of the semester, which for means lots of school visits for someone in the School Library Teacher program like me. I started off my week at Watertown High School early on Monday morning. Even with leaving my house a little after 7:00, I didn’t get to the high school library until almost 7:45. Surprisingly, the library was quite crowded! I spent a few hours taking notes on how teens were using the library for an assignement for my YA Library Collections class. It was interesting to see that no students were checking out books, but rather making use of the technology resources in the library. Some of the technology that I observed students using were Vinyl sticker printers, 3-D printers, poster printers, copiers, Chrome Books, and Chrome Book chargers. My Tuesday was not spent at a school, but I did make a quick visit to the public library in my neighborhood’s town square. I visited the children’s librarian there, who helped me to find some more nonfiction picture books in…
Registration Time!
Posted November 13, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
Guess what time it is? Registration! This is Registration Week for SLIS! I have officially registered for the Spring 2020 semester! Woo! I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was working on going through the course description list and the two year projected schedule, and I’ve been trying to think about what I want to get out of the rest of my time in my program here at SLIS. The whole registration process has always been a bit stressful for me for a few reasons: not every class is taught every semester, and then some classes are only taught in specific locations specific semesters or are only online or only in-person, and then adding in the fact that I’m only taking one class at a time it can feel like if I don’t jump on an opportunity to take a class now I will miss my chance. It was a bit easier when I was taking the core classes (LIS 407, LIS 415, and LIS 488), because those are taught Fall, Spring, and Summer,…
Reality Check!
Posted November 12, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I couldn’t believe it when I logged into my classes this week and saw that it was week 10 of the semester. By the time this blog is posted, it will be week 11, and there will be less than a month left in the semester. Yikes! So of course, I’m focused right now on all the projects I have to complete before then. I have two papers and a small group project to finish, as well as my ongoing project work for Digital Libraries. I don’t have any projects for my Intro to Programming course, but that’s because each week there are several very time-consuming labs to complete. I’m thankful there’s not an extra project on top of that because that would be a little too much to handle. As usual, I want to try and finish some projects early if I can. I think this is especially important for this semester because of all the holidays coming up. This is my first Fall semester, and the first time I’ve had to think about…
Welcome to William!
Posted November 11, 2019 by Lindsey Clarke
We have added William to our blogging team. A little about William from his bio: “Hi everybody, I’m William Crouch. I am from Denton, Texas and moved up to Boston in September 2019 so that I could experience a real winter. I am part of the History and Archives Management Dual Degree program. I chose to attend Simmons because of the opportunity to get a strong education in both History and Library Science at the same time. I completed my undergrad in 2019 at Austin College (Go Roos!), a small school in Sherman, Texas, where I spent most of my time playing for the Roos Tennis Team. In 2018, I had the opportunity to work at Walt Disney World through the Disney College Program and found that I wanted to further my career with Disney. I wanted to use my love for history at Disney and found the Disney Archives which led me to a Library Science program. In my free time, you can find me watching tennis, playing video games, or exploring the many…
Influencer for a Day?
Posted November 8, 2019 by Katie Carlson
On Monday, October 28th, I was thrown into the world of large scale social media, as I was put in charge of Simmons University’s Instagram story! EEEK! While longtime readers know that I was a blogging queen back in the day, I only have 710 followers on insta, and had NEVER posted an original story — only shared content I was tagged in. I logged into the Simmons instagram, and suddenly had 6,000+ semi-captive listeners. Let me tell you, it was exhausting. While my takeover was largely authentic — yes, I do sometimes go to the Gardner on my lunch break, but NO I don’t always have on a full face of makeup at 8 a.m. — it took some planning and creativity to brainstorm just how to share my experiences with Simmons’ insta-sphere. I will admit that I definitely had a storyboard for my day, mapped out with what I thought would be good video opportunities. I was pretty proud of my “What’s in the bag????” section, where I went through what I have…
Creating a Digital Library
Posted November 5, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I wanted to write about LIS 462: Digital Libraries, because it is unlike any class I’ve taken before. It’s not just about studying digital libraries, it’s also about creating one. For our semester-long project, we are creating a digital library highlighting a late 19th century children’s scrapbook. The scrapbook, which was donated to the Boston Children’s Museum, contains drawings of different rooms of a house, with lots of color images that were cut and pasted into the book. There are also a few paper dolls. It’s a darling little scrapbook and I can imagine a little child having a lot of fun putting it together. To handle all aspects of the digital library’s creation, we have a project manager and several committees. These committees are responsible for different parts of the library. For example, the digitization committee scanned, digitized, and posted the scrapbook on our shared class Google Drive. The systems committee is creating the website and layout, the metadata committee is creating metadata for all the images, and the environmental scan committee looks…