Things I Wished I Knew Before I Started Grad School
Since I’m graduating this May, I wanted to use my final HLS blog post to reflect a bit on the things I wish I knew before I started grad school. […]
Author Archives
Paige Szmodis
Advice for Starting a New Job During Grad School
I’ve been very fortunate to have gotten a new full-time librarian job before I graduate from my MLIS program this May, but transitioning to a new job in the middle […]
How to Build a Job Search Strategy
With two months to go until I finish my MLIS program, I recently completed my first full-time library job search. I started seriously looking and applying for jobs this past […]
10 Ideas for Building Libraries of Things
Libraries have long claimed that they’re not just warehouses for books, but many have been increasing their circulating collections of non-traditional library materials–otherwise known as “Library of Things”—in the past […]
A List of Resources to Practice Critical Cataloging
In my Information Organization course at Simmons, we had two weeks dedicated to classification theory, which included some materials about critical cataloging. Critical cataloging is, essentially, being aware of and […]
10 Fun and Fascinating Rare Books Terms I Learned This Semester
This past fall semester, I took a Rare Books and Special Collections course that introduced me to a whole new vocabulary of interesting—and often funny—terms that librarians and booksellers use […]
10 Digital Humanities Tools that Librarians Should Know About
Though the field of the digital humanities has been steadily growing in popularity in the past decade or so, it still has a bit of an ambiguous definition—the intersection between […]
Why Digitization Work Is So Much More Than Scanning
Every so often, when some disaster destroys special collections and archives, people seem to take to the internet to chide librarians, archivists, curators, and other cultural heritage professionals to ask, […]
Why Every Future Librarian Should Take Learning Cataloging Seriously
In the past, I had been hesitant to declare a strong career interest in metadata and cataloging (I even wrote about my desire for an interdisciplinary library school curriculum for […]
Library Work Won’t Love You Back
This summer, I have been fortunate to have an internship that I love. I loved the work of cataloging, enjoyed the company of my coworkers, learned a lot, and actually […]
How to Get Over Technophobia
Last semester, I heard of a concept called “performative technophobia,” in which someone might proclaim a fear or aversion to technology in hopes of either getting people do complete some […]
The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Library School Education
When I started my MLIS program at Simmons University last fall, I regularly heard my classmates introduce themselves with exactly what type of librarian they wanted to be. There were […]
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