Getting Hired
Posted October 23, 2012 by Julie Steenson
Many students writing and reading this blog are Millennials, actively pursuing a first-time career. Yes, you were born digital and your perspective brings one thing to the field of library science, whereas the life experiences and digital growth of mid-lifers bring something different. With all the hoopla over the value of the master’s degree, we are all, regardless of age, concerned about the same thing: Will we get a job? In this economy, every profession seems to share this concern, but a visit to the ALA group of LinkedIn tells us that library graduates across the nation share the same worries about getting a job, getting the experience required for a job, keeping current…and whether gray hair is a detriment or a plus. Graying hair means: Life has been your university. You are mature. You have experience triumphing over adversity and meeting challenges. Graying hair does NOT mean: Deadwood, technologically illiterate, or a lack of enthusiasm or innovation. These less desirable attributes belong to tired personalities that have nothing to do with age. I have…
“Library” Cataloging Experience
Posted October 22, 2012 by Sarah Barton
I thought that cataloging would be my jam. My calling. My future. This assumption, for better or worse, was based on one thing: my iTunes library. Ever since I can remember, I have been militant when it comes to organizing my music. I have carefully constructed playlists by genre (Country, Hip-Hop, Rock, etc.), but I also have some that are not quite so easily categorized, such as “Chill,” “Random,” “Strange,” and “Guitar Hero” (thank you, junior year of college). My basic cataloging method is as follows: For every song in each of my playlists, the “Genre” field in iTunes contains the name of the playlist that the song is in. That way, if a playlist gets accidentally deleted, or I can’t remember whether I put a song in “Strange” or “Chill,” I can easily figure out where it lives. It isn’t sophisticated or foolproof, but it forces me to make deliberate categorizing decisions and gives me peace of mind. One thing that I love about my iTunes library is that many of the choices that…
Librarian Stereotypes
Posted October 21, 2012 by lazylibrarian
So everyone knows the “Marian the Librarian” stereotypes. The big glasses, the bun, the pencil skirt, and the finger always ready to shush you. (If you haven’t seen the Music Man, watch this!) Hopefully, those stereotypes are on the out. In fact there is a great Tumblr called This is What a Librarian Looks Like that shows that librarians are anything but that. One stereotype that seems to persist though at Simmons is that librarians love cats. It has a basis in fact I guess since everyone around me seems obsessed. There are multiple GSLIS professors who use Lol Cats in their powerpoint presentations, my friends spend dinner oohing and aahing over cute animal pictures and even the “Be a Sweetie, Wipe the Seatie” sign in my hall’s bathroom is a kitten…I don’t know, perhaps I have no heart but that is one professional stereotype I do not represent. Cute children? Yes. Puppies? A lot of the time. Cats? Uh, no. Sorry cats. However, I have noticed something interesting about all the librarian friends I’ve…
GOOOO Team!
Posted October 20, 2012 by Maggie Davidov
To be a GSLIS student is to be a team player. Group work, as I am finding out, is an essential part of this program. In my undergrad years I was a theater major so I guess I was working on group project, or plays, all the time but I never thought about it that way. Lately, as I wind down one group project and start up two more, it truly has been tickling my fancy, this whole idea of a paper or project’s success or failure linked with someone else’s. I think it pushes us to do better, forces us to swim harder because we’re buoyed to one another and it’s sink or swim together. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I am constantly dreading the evaluation at the end where my fellow teammates will rip me to shreds and tell the professor I was one very bad person to work with and I should be shunned to the dungeons of Moodle to await trial by Zotero (seriously, don’t those programs sound like fairytale locations…anyone?)….
What Does a Library Lesson Look Like?
Posted October 19, 2012 by Maya Bery
It’s a question I get asked over and over again, by strangers and by those closest to me. My friends and family know that I love what I’m doing, some of them know I get to do cool tech things like play with Glogster, or Prezi, or VoiceThread, and iPads, but they don’t really know what happens during a library lesson. The short answer is, of course, not very helpful: many things. Our core goals as school librarians are to foster a love of reading (naturally), but in today’s “information overload” age, our job is also to teach students key information literacy skills while meeting state curricular standards. “What does that mean?” I hear you asking. Well, to give you an example, the past two weeks I’ve worked with several high school classes in my practicum to help them with different research projects. Part of this process has involved teaching a refresher on how to use the OPAC to find books relating to their topics. Part of it has been website evaluation – a recap…
Yoga – You Won’t Regret It
Posted October 18, 2012 by cdelnero
For those of us who, like me, are buried in the depths of this program we can truly understand the need to keep our mental and physical health at the forefront. I do feel strongly that we deserve to reward ourselves for all of our hard work. But sometimes we reward ourselves in the wrong way. For example, I tend to treat myself with spending money and eating delicious food, which is a bad choice for my wallet and my waistline. I should be making better choices; after all, I’m paying for a gym membership that I never use and I have a bike collecting dust in the closet. This week however, I discovered what has been missing from my life all this time: Yoga. My first ever yoga class was on Monday and I am completely hooked! Not only did it feel so good to stretch, but I could feel my muscles working and I could feel my breathing becoming even. At the end of the class, we spent about 15 minutes doing guided…
My first rental car and an earthquake…My own series of unfortunate events!
Posted October 17, 2012 by Julie Steenson
I don’t have to work or attend class on Tuesdays so it is normally my day to hunker down and get a lot of homework done. Well, I am writing this Tuesday night and have nothing to show for my day but a beloved smashed car, a shiny red rental car in my garage, and a Facebook posting about our earthquake. To back up, I gave up my homework day this week to attend inter-library loan training by our New Hampshire State Library (as I live and work in NH). The ILL system for New Hampshire uses the NHU-PAC (The New Hampshire Union Public Access Catalog) and the system is a bit dated and not intuitive…but it works! The holdings of over 375 libraries in the state are represented in the NHU-PAC. Our small libraries thrive on our ability to share our resources and provide patrons with materials from partner libraries all over the state, delivered daily our state library van service. Training is offered periodically and today, I attended a day of training being…
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Posted October 15, 2012 by Sarah Barton
As promised, whether you like it or not, here is a retrospective account of my courses from last semester: Mondays, 9am-noon – LIS 415; Reference and Information Services A core class, one that everyone must take. The idea behind the class is that nearly every job that requires an LIS degree involves working with information, so this class teaches how and where to find it. We learned about hundreds (literally, hundreds) of information sources and their function. Homework assignments involved finding the answers to obscure questions without using Google, Wikipedia, or anything else on the free web. (Daunting, but useful.) We also learned the basics of reference and customer service etiquette. This and LIS 415 are probably the most library-ish core courses that you will take. Tuesdays, 9am-noon – LIS 488; Technology for Information Professionals A core class, one that everyone must take. The idea behind the class is that technology has permeated just about every aspect of LIS and, for that matter, the free world. As information professionals, librarians are expected to have a…
Conferences, Conferences, Conferences!
Posted October 14, 2012 by lazylibrarian
I just hit submit on my registration for the NEA (New England Archivist) Fall Meeting that is going to take place at Simmons! Ok, call me a nerd but I love conferences. What’s even better is getting to go to them for free by volunteering. A lot of conferences are looking for student volunteers to help run things like the registration desk and in exchange you get to go to the sessions after your shift is over. And since its Boston, a lot of conferences in a lot of topic areas come here. If it’s free, I’ll sit on just about anything. The more information, the better! This summer I volunteered on the registration desk for the AALL (American Association of Law Librarians) conference. I had a two hour shift and the best part was my friend signed up for the same time and we were late in the day so it wasn’t very busy. In exchange for telling several women (I’m not joking, this came up at least three times) where they could buy…
Instant Gratification
Posted October 13, 2012 by Maggie Davidov
Yes, we live in that kind of culture. Yes, our society demands satisfaction from us RIGHT NOW. I have never been more aware of this need for speed now that I assist 13-year-olds with their research every day of the week. What is it about waiting for answers that makes us so itchy? Has Google gotten THAT good? Have we gotten that lazy? I ask myself these questions as I sit at this reference desk after I’ve had three different students ask me in a matter of 15 minutes what the difference is between reference and reserves, and why in the world they can’t take these books out of the library. I suppose the library does seem antiquated with it’s rules about not being able to take certain books out and only being able to take out only so many books/dvds/cds to a generation of young people who get whatever they want whenever they want it on the world wide web. This younger generation doesn’t want to be limited. They want access…to EVERYTHING. In my…