Opportunity: Collaboration with Colleagues – Drexel iSchool blog

Lindsay Cummings – @lindsaysc shared this with us last week. Add it to your to-read list. There really is nothing better than collaboration with your colleagues – and this is a great example of it. -Heidi

I wanted to let you and the rest of the HLS team know about a blog run by Drexel iSchool’s Student Chapter of ALA (SCALA).  As a previous officer, I started this blog and the new officers have taken off running with new ideas for it.  We have started a new guest blogging series that will features posts from new librarians and current students on a range of topics about starting out in the library field.  Here’s our first guest blogger post by Kiyomi Deards.

Drexel SCALA’s on Twitter, too – @DrexelSCALA And if you’d like a (still) growing list of other ALA Student organization twitter accounts – here’s a list I started making. Let me know if your school isn’t up there yet! If you have the opportunity to collaborate with others, it’s worth the effort!

The Road to ALA ’11: LIS Student Tips and Tricks

{This post is largely derived from these posts on my blog — for more detail on my ALA ’10 experiences, check them out!}

Last year, I attended my first ALA conference as a library school student, and it was an eye-opening experience. Of all the local and national librarian conferences I’ve been to, it is by far the biggest and most overwhelming. Here are some of my tips for staying on a library school student budget, networking, and more:

• Seek funding to offset your expenses. ALA’s Student to Staff program has already picked its members, but ask around at your library school for other opportunities. Are there any scholarships or grants for travel at your school? Do you know anyone you can split a hotel room with (if not, ask librarians on Twitter)?

Click through for more!!

Diversity in LIS – From My Perspective

Dear Reader,

Please take one moment to scroll down the page a little and look at the fancy little avatar photos we have below, exhibiting the contributing writers to this here blog. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Have any first impressions? Thoughts? I know I did. When bringing this group together for purposes of writing about library school and the profession we are about to enter, I approached the bloggers I had been reading, heard about, or came across in my daily interweb scanning life. It wasn’t until all those photos were posted on this page that I saw an issue. 1 white guy and 5 white girls. Two things bothered me about this discovery. First, if this little group of writers is any sort of microcosm of the greater LIS student body and the profession, there is a problem. Second, and this was most embarrassing to me, when scanning my Twitter lists and blogs for confirmation, I found very little evidence of diversity there.

The Road to ALA ’11: Our Experiences Thus Far

Typical conference experience - Photo from ALA on Flickr - click for Original

In preparation for ALA 2011 in New Orleans, we wanted to share some experiences we’ve had at previous conferences.  The whole professional development factor is an important one to be involved in early in one’s career, and we all believe that should start in school. To that end, we have compiled some short thoughts below, with links to previous posts discussing our adventures at conferences. Our range of experiences from a national conference, to regional, to sub-fields give a great overview for what one might expect. This will be an on-going post series leading up to ALA Annual, so if you’ve blogged, or plan on blogging, about a conference, let us know. We want to hear your story.

Have you attended a conference yet? What is most exciting or scary about them?