Book Bound in Boston
Posted October 10, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
Perks of living in Boston and being a library school student: meeting famous children’s/YA authors. Just a couple weeks ago, my Writing for Children professor ended class early so a couple students can go meet Rainbow Rowell at Brookline Booksmith. Rowell is the author of Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, and Carry On! About a week ago, Brown Girl Dreaming author Jacqueline Woodson was at Harvard Book Store, and then last Saturday, they hosted R.J. Palacio. If that name doesn’t sound familiar, R.J. Palacio is the mastermind behind the Wonder books, and is known for her character Augie Pullman. Before I was able to meet R.J., I had the privilege of meeting six authors at an amazing awards ceremony and reception for the Horn Book hosted at our very own Simmons University. My Writing for Children professor had strongly encouraged us to attend last Friday, and I’m am so glad she did! While I met so many amazing authors, I unfortunately wasn’t able to meet Angie Thomas, the famous woman behind The Hate U Give. Although…
I’m Back!
Posted October 4, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
It’s been a little while since my last post! At the beginning of August (literally less than 12 hours after my summer class ended) I was in the hospital getting major surgery. Unfortunately, the recovery time for this surgery is rather lengthy, and I’ve been staggering my return dates, but now I’m back in the saddle for school, work, and now blog writing! Woo-hoo! Thus far at Simmons I’ve taken all of my core classes (LIS 407: Information Sources and Services, LIS 415: Information Organization, and LIS 488: Technology for Information Professionals), and two of my electives (LIS 451: Academic Libraries and LIS 404: Principles of Management). I mentioned back in April that I had registered for LIS 421: Social Informatics for the Fall 2019 semester. Since then, I ended up switching classes to LIS 401: Foundations of Library and Information Science. This class was recommended to me when I was talking with someone late last year about switching out of archives, and had the two year projected course schedule that SLIS puts out been…
Connections and Libraries
Posted October 3, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
With a big paper due this week, I knew I was going to need a few study breaks. On Tuesday night, I went back to Loretta’s for a good workout of fast-paced line dancing. Wednesday was a busy day for me with meeting with a professor for my paper due this week, class, and then a conference called Connect Boston. The first conference of its kind, Connect Boston has a goal of connecting Catholic young adults to like-minded professionals around the Boston area. The event started with opening keynote speeches from the founder of Young Catholic Professionals and the CEO of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS). After these two opening talks, there were breakout sessions for networking with Catholic professionals in similar fields. As a school library student, of course I went to the education panel. As I expected, I was the only library student in a room full of teachers. The three panelists in my breakout session were a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, the headmaster of St. Benedict Classical Academy…
Putting Theory into Practice: Tackling Information Literacy for Incarcerated Students
Posted October 2, 2019 by Katie Carlson
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
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…
Lots of Reading
Posted September 27, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
I was very busy this past weekend getting readings done, and my first written assignment for my YA Library Collections class was due on Wednesday. The assignment was to read a Young Adult book. Figuring out what is Young Adult is the hard part. I went to talk to my local children’s librarian at the neighborhood branch of the Boston Public Library, and she showed me her recommendations for good YA books in the collection. Sitting down with the pile of books, it was hard to choose just one. Instead, I chose to read one for the assignment and bring two other books home to read later. Spending all weekend reading Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina was quite fun, especially when you can lounge in the library’s comfy chair. But after reading that, I realized I have another task to do. When I was in the library this weekend, I saw a teen hanging out in the adult section and the teen section. I asked her to show…
Always Say Yes to Free Pizza
Posted September 25, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Having survived a crazy, first few weeks of the semester full of extensive planning, and then replanning, I’m starting to finally feel settled again. And with the start of a new semester here at Simmons is all the fun events! Since I haven’t been an on-campus student since last Fall, it was really great coming back and seeing so many familiar faces! An event that I remembered hearing about last fall, that I was lucky to be able to actually attend this fall, was Pizza with the Dean. Besides the obvious reasoning of free food, I thought this was a really great opportunity to actually meet and talk with our COCIS Dean Marie desJardins in a casual, conversational setting. If there is one goal I have been really trying to work on throughout grad school, it is being more outgoing in a work meets social type setting. Networking has always been a terrifying concept for me and, while I like to think I am an interesting person to talk to, once I start interacting with…
Project Time!
Posted September 24, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I can’t believe we’re already into the fourth week of classes! I’ve gotten into the rhythm of classwork and due dates (thanks in part to my awesome new planner), and I’ve been balancing everything well. I have two individual projects due in early October and I’ve already started my research for them. The first is a presentation on a digital library for my Digital Libraries course, and the second is a paper on the influence of technology during a specific time period for my Social Informatics course. They are both very interesting, but I wanted to focus on my digital libraries project in this blog. One of the first topics we discussed in class is how digital libraries are difficult to define. Is a digital library literally a collection of digitized objects? Does it need to be limited to books only? Does it need to be organized by time, subject, object, or location? Should it be easy to search through? My classmates and I get to answer some of these questions by each evaluating a…
Moving on to Fall
Posted September 20, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This week was fairly uneventful, as all I did was read teen books and sneeze a lot. I really enjoy this program in SLIS! All my assigned readings are really fun, and I never thought homework in grad school would be fun. The only hard part about being slammed with so much homework is I woke up on Monday with the sniffles. The sniffles are really no fun, especially when a sore throat follows a day or two later. Lots of naps this week with the sniffles, but by next week I should be back to Loretta’s for line dancing. For my Young Adult class, I am evaluating trends in publishing. It is so interesting, and makes my course seem so relevant to the profession I will be going into in about a year. The critical texts we read correspond with the assigned young adult books we read, which is really nice. In my other class, I have a lot of textbook readings about story structure. I’ve always loved writing, so I don’t mind…
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…