Typical Week in the Life of a SLIS Student
Posted April 21, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
There are only five weeks to go until the end of the semester, and at this point I feel like I can present a pretty accurate view of my typical week! There are two basic genres of LIS program schedule blog posts: working full time while in school and working part time. This is the former. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve left my work every weekday from 8:30-5:30 off this schedule (see Tuesday for the exception to this). Typically, I take a full hour for lunch three out of five days a week and a shorter break the other two days. I’ve also left out most errands, cleaning, and my social life, but I usually have way more time than you would think to spend quality time with other people (safely). My social network in Boston includes a lot of people I’ve met through Simmons. I also get enough sleep! Monday: 5:30-6:00: Go for a short walk. 6:00-7:00: Standing meeting with my group project team for Systems Analysis and Design. 7:00-7:30: Homework. 7:30: Dinner…
Adventures in Weeding
Posted April 14, 2021 by Amie Grosshans
We’re focusing on weeding this week. I’ve covered this topic in two other classes, so I am pretty comfortable with it and know most of the criteria used to weed. But I’ve never had first-hand weeding experience until this week. I’ve been working as an on-call librarian assistant at my hometown library once a month since August, and I love it. I’ve been working mainly at the circulation desk, checking out books, preparing holds for curbside pickup, and answering the phone. But in a fun coincidence, this week I worked on weeding! The library weeds here and there on a regular basis, but every few years there is a larger weeding project. While weeding is based on several criteria, including the condition of the book and whether it contains outdated information, the main criteria my library used was checkout data. If the book had not circulated in the past ten years, then it was on the list to be weeded. I had to weed the books in the 300’s, which is the social sciences. This…
Planning and Researching for IPI
Posted April 13, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
This weekend, I walked to Brookline to run errands and lingered in Brookline Village, which is one of my favorite neighborhoods and pretty near Simmons. The old buildings (especially the Bank of America at Coolidge Corner) and bustling streets are really nice to explore, even these days. It’s also the only place I can find quarters to do laundry! April has been extremely busy so far, since my research partner and I are conducting a lot of focus groups. Over these four hour-long interviews, we’re planning to build a comprehensive understanding of student and staff experience in the Inter-Professional Informationist post-masters certificate program at SLIS. This pilot program is for librarians who either currently hold or want to take on inter-professional informationist roles, as librarians who embed with biomedical research or clinical teams. Planning and carrying out this research has been really rewarding and challenging so far. Working with my amazing research partner has also been a highlight of the process, and I’m so glad not to be doing this project alone! As I’ve mentioned…
My Last Registration!
Posted April 10, 2021 by Sarah Callanan
It’s that time again…Registration! You know how much I love it! We do it every semester! In the past few weeks, we’ve had registration for both Summer 2021 and Fall 2021. The Fall 2021 registration period was my last registration at Simmons due to my January 2022 graduation date, so in turn this will be my last blog post about registration, which is kind of bittersweet. I had such a difficult time picking what I wanted to take for my final two classes at Simmons! I especially had a difficult time picking my Summer 2021 class. There seems to be fewer classes offered during the summer, and a lot of them are geared more towards the Archives Management concentration or the School Library Teacher concentration. Of the ones not geared towards those two concentrations, it feels like I’ve taken a lot of the options already, like LIS 404: Principles of Management, LIS 407: Information Sources and Services, LIS 451: Academic Libraries, LIS: 453: Collections Development and Management, LIS 475: Organizational/Information Ethics, and LIS 488: Technology…
The Final Countdown and Fall 2021 Admitted Student Event
Posted April 9, 2021 by William Crouch
Well, my final semester at Simmons is coming up after nearly two and a half years. To say my experience has been atypical is almost an understatement. But before we get into my final semester, let’s talk about a recent event the Admissions office just put on. We recently had an Admitted Students Event for our Fall 2021 upcoming students. It was a lot of fun getting to talk about my experience at Simmons as someone nearly finished with their program with people just starting out on this journey. Prospective students were able to talk with current students like myself, alumni, and faculty during this event which I hoped shed a lot of light about what distinguishes Simmons from other universities. We were also able to share with students our plans for the Fall 2021 semester and that we are planning to have it in person. So I will be back in Boston for the final semester and I hope to get to see many of the faces I saw at the Admitted Student Event. …
Revisiting an outdated children’s encyclopedia as an adult
Posted April 8, 2021 by Andrea Everett
After co-facilitating a class discussion about ready reference resources, I was inspired to revisit a text from my past: an A-Z children’s biography book from 2001. The Kids’ Fun-Filled Biographies book contains 500 illustrated entries about famous people worldwide, from Billie Holiday to the Medici family to Rudolph Valentino. I read this book obsessively from the ages of five to eight. I impressed—or, more likely, scared—many adults with my ability to recall obscure celebrity trivia, especially birth and death dates. When Hank Aaron’s recent passing made the news, I recognized his name because he was the first entry in the biography book. (If there was any remaining mystery, I don’t know much about sports.) This slim volume went out-of-date about five minutes after hitting bookstore shelves; now, twenty years later, it is an ancient artifact. However, my mother has forbidden me from getting rid of it, and my Student Snippets audience will rejoice to learn that I brought it with me when I moved for grad school. Over the weekend I sat down and reread…
Check out a librarian’s blog
Posted April 6, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
In the course of my research for a class presentation, I came across a librarian’s blog that I wanted to share. The author of this blog is Sally Gore, the Manager of Research & Scholarly Communication Services at the Lamar Soutter Library, UMass Medical School. This is a great example of a librarian blog, a genre of internet content that has decreased in volume as conversations have moved to Twitter and other social media sites. Nevertheless, many bloggers are still posting and many inactive blogs are still up. I would recommend looking at librarian blogs for information about what working in the library field is like, even though a lot of what you’ll find is from the mid-2010s heyday of the blogging world. Sally’s blog was interesting because of its relevance to my research project for LIS 621 (Conducting Research), but the posts about books Sally had read also caught my eye. I added a lot of them to my reading list, including Data Feminism, Meeting Design, and Prairie Fires. The list of books I…
Reviewing Reviews
Posted April 1, 2021 by Amie Grosshans
This week we’ve been focusing on book reviews. Book reviews are just one part of the collection development process, but they are very important. Established journals like School Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly write reviews of upcoming books and librarians frequently use them to figure out what books to buy for the library. Reviews are surprisingly complex because they must pack a lot of information, including details about the most important plot points, analysis of the text and illustrations (if there are any), and a firm recommendation decision, in 250 words or less. This is hard to do! Our assignment for this week was to choose a book and write a review of it. Then, we had to find three other journal reviews of the same book. Lastly, we had to analyze, compare, and contrast them all. It was difficult but enlightening. The book I chose to review was Allergic by Megan Wagner Lloyd. It’s a graphic novel about a girl named Maggie who only realizes she has a severe allergy to animals after…
Daylight savings
Posted March 30, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
The best part of the second half of March is the sun going down so much later. I don’t understand why we still have non-daylight time during the winter, but the spring forward period is always fun. In the past couple of weeks, it’s meant that I can get some sunlight by going for a walk after work and before starting my homework on weekdays (not to say that I do homework every day).. The only exception is Tuesday, when I close out of a virtual coffee break at work and immediately log into zoom for class. During spring break, I tried to get ahead on work for my asynchronous class, Principles of Management (LIS 404), so I can pace myself a little more in the next few weeks. My professor included a Game of Thrones-themed exercise about hiring and staffing, which was entertaining even though I only know enough about Game of Thrones to recognize some of the names! I’ve also been working on my literature review for LIS 621 (Conducting Research). Luckily, our…
Easy Readers!
Posted March 25, 2021 by Amie Grosshans
After three weeks analyzing picturebooks, we’re now focusing on easy readers. An easy reader is a book for children who are just beginning to read, and, like picturebooks, are a lot more complicated than I thought. It’s not simply that easy readers feature easy words, it’s that they have to take into account the actual process of reading. It’s easy to forget that at one point we all had to be taught how to read: how to move our eyes from left to right across the page, how to read punctuation marks, and how to zig zag our eyes from one end of a paragraph to the beginning of another. This is a lot to learn, and can be overwhelming. So easy readers are simple, to allow new readers to absorb all of this information. There are several characteristics specific to an easy reader, including large fonts, generous spacing between words, and simple sentences. The words usually have fewer than five letters, because short words are easier to read and sound out. And, most of…