How I learned to keep worrying and love library school

Alyssa Vincent is entering her second (and final) year with Emporia State University’s School of Library and Infromation Management Program in Portland, Oregon. She is a library assistant at the University of Oregon-Portland Library and Learning Commons and a Data Management Intern at One Economy.  She also volunteers in Bitch Magazine’s Library. You can read her blog here: ex libris, et cetera, and be sure to follow her on twitter: @vin_alyssa.

Photo credit: Mri Z via the Commons

So, you’ve subscribed to your library blogs, bought your textbooks, stocked up on highlighters, and are ready for your new life as a library school student/future superstar librarian. Every child will love reading because of you! Students will have unprecedented information literacy skills thanks to your trailblazing instruction!

Yeah, but first you have to get over all of this self-doubting, second-guessing, and generalized loathing of library school and librarianship.

In defense of online LIS education

CC image courtesy of cindiann on Flickr

In online discussions about the current state of LIS education, I’ve seen heavy criticism of online education.  Of course, I can’t seem to find many of these discussions now that I need to reference them — but you can check out these blog posts, especially the comments, for some context.  I think the general perception of online programs, LIS or not, is that they are easy and students enrolled in them are recluses, hiding away from interacting with other people.  While I can’t speak for all programs and all online students, my experience has been that online programs are challenging — though in a different way than offline programs — and I certainly am no recluse.

Beginner Status

Greetings from New York,

This is my first official post as a new contributing writer for Hack Library School and I’m psyched to share a bit of my experience from the past week (08/20/11 to 08/27/11) both as a new library school student at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and as a transplant to New York City.

Hack Your Program: University of Iowa SLIS

Note: like other posts in the Hack Your Program series, opinions expressed here are mine alone. I have grown so much and enjoyed myself thoroughly at SLIS, so the few items I offer as ‘areas for improvement’ should be viewed as constructive criticism and also understood through the lens of LIS education or the U of I as a whole: most of the things I talk about it that section are not specific to SLIS. I absolutely loved by time at SLIS and felt like it allowed me to really come into my own as a researcher and a student–I’d love to hear the thoughts of other SLIS students and alumni too, and I’m happy to share more information with folks who are considering applying!

Quick Overview: SLIS is located in the University library in Iowa City. Our department has 8 faculty members (all of whom I adore, btw) and small class sizes. The largest classes I encountered were the Foundations courses (more on that later) where the entire incoming cohort (~30 people I think is average) takes the courses together. Most of my classes had between 12 and 20 people, although some have slightly more or less. The MLS is a two-year program, although some students (like me) take longer.

Unpacking the Conference: Planning, Execution, and Afterthoughts

This post is a shared effort between HLS editor Julia Skinner and Katie DeVries Hassman, Sam Bouwers, and Gwen Persons, who were part of the conference planning team for Unpacking the “Library”: Exploring Works in Progress Across the Field of LIS. Other planners included Melody Dworak, Christine Mastalio, and Julie Zimmerman, who looked over parts of the post for us! To see more about the programs from that day, go to Julia’s post here.

The audience waits for a conference session to start.

Part I: The Planning

Julia: Planning a conference is a lot of work. It’s fun and rewarding work, but if you’re going to hold a conference make sure to give yourself as much time for planning as you can! The idea for our conference came when we wanted to find another way to educate our fellow students and encourage them to grow professionally. Having a goal and a framework in place when we started planning was important, because it made our lives much easier when people asked ‘why are you hosting a conference?’ or ‘what do you hope people will get out of this?’