Best of Fall Semester 2011

Carrying on the tradition of past end-of-semester wrap-up posts, we’ve pulled together some articles from Fall Semester, 2011 for your viewing enjoyment. Some of you may be in your last semester in library school (congratulations!) or maybe you’re still in the first year (hang in there!). Either way, to keep you busy we’ve compiled some reading lists you can return to over the next few weeks and get caught up. Think of it as HackLibSchool 101.

Our Top 10 Posts (by hits):

• A Well-Kept Secret: How to Become an International School Librarian
• How I Learned to Keep Worrying and Love Library School
• Hack Your Program: San Jose State University SLIS (Online)
• Say What? Things I Haven’t Learned in Library School
• HackLibSchool on Occupy Wall Street: How do Libraries Fit In?
• Quality Control
• In Defense of Online LIS Education
• Work/Life Balance in Library School
• What Does Your Degree Mean to You?
• A Cool Fundraising Idea…or Maybe Just a Shameless Plug

Top Post per Writer (by hits):

• The Digital Public Library of America – Micah Vandegrift
• Quality Control – Zack Frazier
• What Does Your Degree Mean to You? – Annie Pho
• A Well-Kept Secret: How to Become an International School Librarian – Laura Sanders
• How to Spend Your Winter Vacation – Rebecca Halpern
• Say What? Things I Haven’t Learned in Library School – Rose L. Chou
• HackLibSchool on Occupy Wall Street: How do Libraries Fit In? – Julia Skinner
• Internship Tips and Insights – Lauren Dodd
• HuffPo: Helping or Hurting? – Turner Masland
• The Elevator Speech – Ashley Wescott
• Hack Library School: Fall 2011 Kickoff! – Britt Foster
• iPads, and Kindles, and nooks! Oh, My! – Teresa Silva

Best Comment Conversations:

• HackLibSchool on Occupy Wall Street: How do Libraries Fit In?
• In Defense of Online LIS Education
• Quality Control

Catch Up on Our Series:

• Library School Starter Kit:
  • The First Term
  • A Class Checklist
  • Questions and Advice
• Declassified: Reference
• Hack Your Program: San Jose State University SLIS (Online)

Weirdest Search Terms That Led Someone to Our Blog:

• cartoon library
• how to hack firstclass
• i hate school logo
• how to dress like a librarian
• handsome businessman
• heroes to look up to
• glasses for reading in bed

Recommended by Your Humble Writers:

Rose

• Stuchell, Lance. (November 17, 2011). Wanted, Free Labor: The Impact and Ethics of Unpaid Work
• Clancy, Kate. (December 14, 2011). Networking, Scholarship and Service: The Place of Science Blogging in Academia
• Manjoo, Farhad. (December 13, 2011). Independent bookstores vs. Amazon: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you

Annie

• Bondfield, Bret. (January 11,2012). Perspective and Doing Good Work via In the Library with a Lead Pipe
• Meyer, Katie. (January 20, 2012). Branding Yourself: Not as painful as you think via Gradhacker
• Yelton, Andromeda. (October 31, 2011). The two most important things I know about public speaking

Rebecca

• Dorney, Erin and Eric Frierson. (November 9, 2011.) Renovation as a Catalyst for Change  via In the Library with the Lead Pipe.
• MacColl, John. (2010). Academic Libraries and the Challenge of Abundance.

Micah

• ACRL College and Research Library News Scholarly Communications Column Article: The Inevitability of Open Access
• The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus - Daily Email is invaluable
• A Literary History of Word Processing – NYT
• A Digital Public Library for America? – NYPL
• Has ‘Indie’ become ‘Adult Contemporary’? – NPR
• The Hipsterification of America – NPR
• Excerpt: Take This Book – The Peoples Library at Occupy Wall Street

And for good measure a few digital books that I’ve seen develop from nothing that came out this fall:

• Hacking The Academy - a collection of essays on the (re)evolutions occurring in higher ed.
• #alt-academy - community-building and networked scholarly communication around the theme of unconventional or alternative academic careers.

While we’re at it, two videos:

• Taran Killam/Robyn Dance off 
• 8 Hours in Brooklyn

Zack

• Occupy Librarianship: 5 Variations on a Theme

Teresa

• #Occupy : The Tech at the Heart of the Movement-The Atlantic

Julia

• Review of The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam–David Banash
• 10 Social Networking Posts that Sink Careers
• Turn Any Surface into a Touch-Sensitive Instrument with a $20 Microphone
• Early 1900s in Color–photos
• MIT Open Courseware

Ashley

• Is The Internet Awake? – Edlundart.com
• Future of Bookstores – Chicago Tonight
• Detroit Libraries Closing: Protesters Stage Sit-In at Lincoln Branch – Huffpost Detroit

Chris

• Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research – The Atlantic
• The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities – Christine Borgman
• The Lifecycle of a Dataset – MIT
• Recommendations for Independent Scholarly Publication of Data Sets – Jonathan Rees

Joanna

• Pearl Harbor Iconic Photo Found not to be from Dec-7 - msnbc.com (“Librarians are Amazing”)
• What “Read it Later” Data Might Mean - Nieman Journalism Lab
• A Girl You should date (the ones who read) - Nona Merah
• 7 Important Digital Humanities Projects - Maria Popova of Brain Pickings
• Todays-digital-documents-are-tomorrows-dinosaurs (on US Gov’t Digitization initiative) – The Washington Times
• Which e-books Are Most Borrowed from Libraries and Why
• (for the Brits out there and yes, this is technically out of “Fall” but it was before this semester started) The Demise of the Public Library (including one opened by Mark Twain) – NY Times / International Herald Tribune

Playing Nicely With Others: Doing Group Work

No Bob, I don't want to stab you with these scissors. I LOVE group work.

How many of you have had to do group work in graduate school? What’s that? All of you? Okay, I thought so. Like it or not, group work is integral to library science curriculum. When I first started, I wondered why I had to do do so much group work. What’s the purpose of it? Is there a lesson to be learned? There are so many risks when you have to work with a group of people you don’t necessarily know that well. Coming from an undergraduate background in art history, where you sit in a dark room and stare at slides, you don’t even know who is in your class, let alone have to talk to anyone. It’s a solitary endeavor. However, library school is totally different. You’re expected to talk to your classmates, peer review their work and collaborate with them. That can be really off-putting for someone who is used to a) shy b) used to studying alone c) new to the program, thus not knowing anyone and d) a control freak. This semester, I’ve had to do a couple of large group projects and wondered how collaborating could be made easier.

Hack Your Program: University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Eric Phetteplace is the Emerging Technologies Librarian at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, Maryland. He reads philosophy, writes poetry, and is sort of obsessed with the differences between various web browsers. He graduated from GSLIS in May of 2011.

The University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. By Kalev Leetaru, used with permission.

Disclaimer

The opinions in this post are solely mine and do not represent my place of employment or the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. I did not take every course or talk to every professor, so I can only vouch for a small part of the school, but hopefully prospective students will find this snapshot useful in making their decision.

Programs

GSLIS offers an M.S. in Library and Information Science, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Studies, and a PhD. There are several concentrations and certificates available: Bioinformatics, Digital Libraries, Data Curation, Youth Librarianship, K-12 School Librarianship, Special Collections, and Community Informatics. There are about 570 M.S. students and a little over 50 apiece for the C.A.S. and PhD, though the majority of students are actually enrolled off-campus through theLEEPonlineeducationprogram.

The M.S. is 40 credit hours has only two required courses: LIS501 Information Organization and Access, and LIS502 Libraries, Information, and Society. Each concentration requires a handful of additional courses. There is a 2-hour practicum course which can be taken anywhere as long as you have an M.L.S. to supervise you. The recommended time for completion is two years but it is possible to finish in one. There is no mandatory final project or thesis for the M.S. but those who choose to stay on and receive a C.A.S. write a thesis.

LIS Blogs to Read

Everyone’s getting ready to go back to school, including your fellow hackers! Part of the library school experience is keeping up with what’s going on in the library world. That way you can discuss the latest trends or scandals with your classmates and professors.

We’ve compiled a few library related blogs that you should check out if you haven’t already.

Annie: I have always enjoyed these two blogs, they both put out great content. Both are collaborative just like HackLibSchool. Team work makes the dream work.

• In the Library with the Lead Pipe
• Closed Stacks

Lauren: There are so many fantastic LIS blogs out there (there is a partial list on my blogroll of some of my favorites), but I’d like to give a shout-out to two relatively new, incredibly enthusiastic and talented academic librarians who also have awesome blogs! They are:

• The Library Adventures of Kiyomi
• Library Scenester

Rose: Here are two must-read archives blogs that I love.  The first is about archives 2.0, the future of archives on the web, and the profession itself.  The second is a collaborative blog by the Smithsonian’s archives featuring their collections (full disclosure: as a volunteer for the National Anthropological Archives, I sometimes post on this blog).

• ArchivesNext
• Smithsonian Collections Blog

Turner: My first recommendation offers sage advice from an academic librarian. The second is put out by the Library of Congress and focuses on digital collections (a growing trend in the library/information management profession and a great place to look for a kick ass job).

• Letters to a Young Librarian
• The Signal: Digital Preservation

Micah: I know this is supposed to be an LIS focused post, but lately I’ve been thinking and rethinking the library blog “echo chamber” (everyone writing about the same things, reading one another’s work, and not engaging outside our field). So my Blogs to Read goes a little outside the LIS world, and it’d be my advice to students to step back once in a while and read something new from marketing, from tech news, from pop culture. These two blogs are both in the “hack” stream, but are great resources for ideas/tips/advice on navigating life in the university.

• GradHacker
• ProfHacker