I’m finally reading Everything in Miscellaneous - and it’s awesome. The irony is that I’m taking a two day subject cataloging class. While the instructor (who is awesome and full of energy) talks about how getting the most specific subject heading is our goal and having things in alphabetical order is good - I can’t help but laugh inside because sitting next to me in my bag is a book that says this isn’t the only way to organize things!

On the subject of teachers - I have had two great instructors at PALINET continuing ed courses over the last month and it makes me wonder why these aren’t the kind of instructors I had in library school. Is it because they’re actually out there doing the work? Is it because they love their jobs (which you can really tell?) or is it just the setting? I don’t know, but I do think that if you’re just out of library school and feel like you’re maybe missing something or if you’re a librarian who wants to beef up your skills, taking a course from a librarian who is out there doing what they’re teaching is the way to go!

It’s finally here - I promised that I’d write this ages ago, but I wanted to get my thoughts in order.

When I started at Drexel a little over a year ago, I was completely panicked! I hadn’t been in school for 5 years and when I graduated last time I had sworn that I would never go back to school. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a strong believer in real life experience (work, conferences, workshops) over organized education (registering for a cycle of classes).

However, I found that I was having trouble communicating with librarians from my roll in the IT department. I thought that going back to school was going to teach me the secret librarian hand-shake and give me the key to understanding where librarians were coming from. When I set out to register for classes I did not want to follow any one track (research, cataloging, technology) because my goal was to learn what a bit of what everyone in the library knew - hopefully helping with my communication problems. Unfortunately the one perfect (sounding) class was discontinued - it was a professional communication course!!

Classes

I started by getting the required classed out of the way. This included 2 research courses, a statistics course, an ethics course, a management course and a systems analysis course - all the while complaining to everyone who’d listen that these courses were a poor foundation for librarianship.

There was no need for 2 research courses (in my opinion). In the first class we spent half of the term on searching Dialog. I loved using Dialog - but did we really need 5 weeks of it? Most libraries can’t even afford to have Dialog - so, while it was fun for me - it wasn’t exactly practical. The result of the end of that term was an annotated bibliography that was then used in the second research course to write a review of literature. Now, it seems to me that as masters level students we would have been able to do the work of both research classes in one class.

Next came statistics!! Now, this was the worst class I took at Drexel. This is not the professor’s fault - but the fact that I could not wrap my brain around all of those mathematical terms and their uses. This class also seemed like a waste of my time. It didn’t teach me about how librarians did their everyday jobs, it’s not even something that most librarians use - only those doing research projects. After doing my little survey I learned that some research classes include a module on statistics - now that makes sense - not an entire term of math!!

Now, the ethics class was interesting, but might have worked better if I had taken it in person. It’s hard to get into ethical debated on a message board - but I think we managed just fine.

Management is a class I was excited about - until I got a few chapters into my textbook - Six Sigma for Managers! This book read like a self-help manual. It was the most useless book I’ve ever had to read - well maybe not - but certainly the most useless I read this past year. Six Sigma is a management style that big manufacturing firms use to measure their success and improve production - guess what? Libraries don’t produce things!! We’re a service organization - so I had to find research (and there were very few papers out there) on how this theory could be applied to service organizations. I was hoping to learn about managing people and a library - not learning how to manage my factory. The problem as I see it is with the way Drexel handles it’s masters program. The IS (information systems) and ILS (information and library science) students all take classes together. I think that this management course was probably required by both IS and ILS students - making it difficult for them to try and teach us all - since we’re all going into different types of organizations.

Systems analysis was something I could have probably been excused from - but I think it’s great that it’s required for all ILS students! Systems are not just computer systems - we are surrounded by systems - the way we handle a reference question and the process we use to check out a book are all systems. I also think that we all agree there is a language barrier between IT and librarians - and so this class is a way to bridge that gap a tiny bit.

My electives varied in their usefulness, the only class that taught me something I didn’t already know something about was Cataloging. My Digital Libraries course was a disappointment. The professor tried to cram every possible schema into one class. Instead it should have focused on the big library schemas like Dublin Core, MODS, METS, TEI, MARCXML… you get the idea. Instead I wrote a paper on OWL - do you know what that is? I still don’t!! My Library Automation course was mostly review for me - not much new there, but I did like getting to read some of the old (yes - we were reading old - out of date reports) technology reports.

General Impressions

Taking the classes online left a bit to be desired. I wanted human contact - and I could have had it if I wanted to wait 4 years for my MLIS - but I was not about to make that kind of commitment or deal with that aggravation. Blackboard is sorely lacking in so many ways it’s shocking that schools are still using it. In the middle of my program Drexel upgraded Blackboard and all of the sudden there was no way to mark message read on the discussion board without reading them - and there was no easy way to follow the thread of the conversation. There are so many great tools for message boards - they’ve been around for ages - why the heck are we using this unfriendly tool? Then there was the fact that the staff were obviously not trained on how to use Blackboard to its fullest - or they just didn’t want to. In some classes I was supposed to email all assignments, in others it was the Digital Dropbox, in others it was the Assignments module - then sometimes the grades were listed in Blackboard - sometimes you just had to guess! There needed to be some consistency across the board.

Overall, I think it’s a shame that I had to spend all of that money and time just to be considered a librarian. What I didn’t already know I could have learned from the librarians around me - and it probably would have been more enjoyable and easier to pick up. In fact, while I was taking Cataloging, I was also training for my new job - spending 6 hours a week with the head cataloger here. That training taught me more than I learned in class - mostly because I’m a hands-on kind of person - I wanted someone to show me what to do - not read thought thousands (yes, thousands) of pages of rules on cataloging & MARC.

What did I Learn

I learned that I don’t ever want to do a degree online again I learned a bit more about myself and time-management. I learned that having an MLIS does not make you better off than the person who doesn’t have the MLIS, but has 6+ years of experience in a library.

I don’t feel much different than I did before I went to school. My job has changed and so I’ve learned more about other areas of the library that way - but the classes on research theory, searching, statistics, management, systems, digital libraries and so on didn’t prepare me any more than jumping in and doing the job myself would have.

The future

I know I sound very negative, but when you think about the time (both doing work and away from my family) and money that went into library school - it’s disappointing that I didn’t get an Ah-hah moment - or something to take with me that would have unlocked that key to librarian-world.

All that said, I think there is potential there to improve on library education. I hear of great classes at other library schools across the country - and I hope that things take a turn for the better. I hope that somewhere library students are learning about the new tools that are out there to help them and their patrons. I hope that schools come up with a more reasonable set of core classes (as previously stated) - and that they update the content used in them (I shouldn’t be reading about how the Internet is accessed using AOL and a phone line).

Conclusion

So that’s it - my What I Learned in Library School post. I’m sorry if I’m disappointed some of you - or made you worried about your own plans to pursue and MLIS. I do think there are schools out there - based on what I’ve read and heard of class offerings - that are teaching more up to date information - and I do think that library schools can be very valuable to those who have never worked in a library - but for me, it was a bit of a let down - and now I have to start paying off the bills!

That’s right, the diploma has arrived! I am now a “real” librarian. My only complaint about this piece of paper - well - two complaints. First it’s too big - why is it so darn big? Second, shouldn’t it say “Master of Library and Information Science”?

Anyway, it’s all over, back to my real (non-student) life!

That’s right - I finally have the results for you. You can browse the survey results on Survey Monkey here, but I don’t feel that that gives you the full picture, so I did a little bit of analysis of my own.

First, I went through and made school names conform to one standard (where possible).

Next, I went through and added a few required classes based on people’s open ended answers (ex. Intro to Libraries/Librarianship).

Lastly, I wasn’t clear in my class descriptions, when I said Intro to Research I meant Intro to Reference/Research. Every library calls that department something different. So if someone entered Intro to Reference as an open ended answer I updated the tally for Intro to Research.

Results

There were 504 responses to the survey. Of those 20.8% were current MLS/MLIS students and only 1.7% graduated before 1970. The majority of respondents graduated between 1991 and 1999 or in 2007.

Respondents attended 79 different schools/campuses, the top 5 of which were:

• Syracuse University–83
• Simmons–23
• Drexel–22
• Indiana University–19
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–17

See the full list of schools/counts.

My goal (purely out of curiosity) was to see what classes used to be required and what classes are required now. I also wanted to see how much variation there was from school to school.

These results are slightly skewed because so many respondents were from Syracuse University, but I thought I’d show them anyway. Here are the required classes by year:

A chart with required classes by year and school would be way to involved for a web page, so you can see this data in this PDF.

It pleases me to see that management is being offered much more now than it was in the past. Along those lines, I’m shocked at the lack of consistency across the board. If we’re all learning something different, then how do libraries know what they’re getting when they hire a new graduate? If we’re all required to get an MLS/MLIS from an ALA accredited school in order to be considered a “real” librarian, then why is it that we all have to take such different classes?

Why aren’t we all required to learn a bit of the basics from each area of the library? All schools should require an intro to reference/research, intro to cataloging, collection development, library automation, management, and systems class - that gives students a feel for each area of the library allowing them to decide where they want to go. Then after giving a grounding throw in some practical experience.

I’m not alone in my thinking. Some of the open ended answers to “Do you feel that library school prepared you for the library world?”:

• In a theoretical sense yes, but I would have liked more practical training. My Archives courses at Temple were more hands on. The Preservation course at Clarion was also hands on, but we could have done more. I would have liked if more interaction with librarians and library work was a part of the curriculum, but I managed to do this independently instead.
• Meh. Cataloging was worthwhile. Intro to Business Research was good. The rest was pretty obvious/pointless. It definitely wasn’t worth the money, but it was a necessary hurdle to getting a library job.
• Some classes do and some don’t. Most of it focuses on theory. I really enjoyed the classes I could use in the real world such as web design, cataloging and collection development. I work in a library and feel bad for those who are not able to. I have learned so much more from working in the library each day. I believe that library programs should be restructured to focus more on real life experiences.
• Hardly. Thankfully I was already employed in the library world. I found the courses and their content woefully out-of-date (dialog?!?!) and mostly abstract. I would have come out of library school with no real inkling of the real library world at all.
• Not as much as library work has.

Other comments that struck me:

• In Library School, they never discussed how to work with different departments, they seem to leave that part out, but its a key part of being a successful librarian. The environment I currently work in has the saying “Serve the Customer first, and remember your colleagues are your customers too” Its something that seems to have created a very friendly work environment.
• Classes from practicing librarians were better than the classes from tenured faculty
• The MLS is an odd degree. For those of us coming to the library world from another profession (i.e. a lot of us! including me), the MLS means very little and either overqualifies us for entry-level paraprofessional jobs or isn’t enough on its own to get higher-level jobs. I feel frustrated by libraries that don’t have the imagination to see how my years of experience in communications may not transfer, no matter how carefully I craft my resume to draw parallels between what I’ve done and what I would be doing in a library or archive. I think there needs to be a lot of attitude adjustment!!!
• I’m truly appalled by the decline in the teaching of knowledge organization in recent years. Some students are very reference-focused when they are at grad school and seem to be able to avoid classes on KO. As a result they have a hard time when they come out into the real world … and the real world has a hard time with them!!!
• Even after spending 3 years and thousands of dollars getting the degree, I believe there should be some sort of certification process. The title “Librarian” should be based on knowledge and skills, regardless of how it is acquired — whether through a degree program or years of working in libraries.
• I wish there was more practical application of theory.
• I realize that I just said this in the previous question, but it’s rather surprising that library students in some (many?) MLS programs can complete their degrees and still have no real library experience. It’s rather like getting an MD without having gone through residency: classroom experience can’t fully prepare you for working in the field every day.

There are so many more responses I want to share, but this post will end up going on forever. In addition to the documents I provided and the link to SurveyMonkey, here are the open ended answers to Anything Further to Add and Do/Did you feel prepared?. For those who are better at compiling statistics, here is the zip file of all responses.

If you generate reports of your own, I just ask that you share with me so I can share with the people who took the time to answer the survey.

[update] I forgot to include the edited result set (the one I cleaned up) I will try to get that attached to this post by tomorrow. [/update]

That’s right folks, it’s official. I now have my final grades and am done with library school! I am now an MLIS graduate of Drexel University (and will be paying for the rest of my life). I’ve promised a what I learned in library school post - and it’s coming, I just wanted to get these grades and catch up on some life things. Keep an eye out, both that and my survey results are coming. For now, here’s what I took in my 1 year of library school at Drexel.

INFO 503 — Intro Info System Analysis — A+
INFO 510 — Info Resources & Services I — A+
INFO 520 — Prof/Soc Aspects of Info Services — A
INFO 511 — Info Resources & Services II — A
INFO 515 — Action Research and Statistics — B
INFO 653 — Digital Libraries — A
INFO 640 — Managing Information Orgs — A
INFO 660 — Cataloging & Classification I — A+
INFO 681 — Legal Bibliography — A
INFO 643 — Information Services In Orgs — A
INFO 664 — Library Automation — A
INFO 683 — Resources for Children — A

I’m working on cleaning up the results for this survey right now (making university names the same, etc) and I’m seeing a few people pointing me to the library websites for their required courses (”You can always look on the schools’ websites for this info.”). I probably need to clarify what I was interested in. I wanted to see what was required in the past and is required now. Obviously those who graduated in the 70s & 80s didn’t have Web Development, but I wanted to get a picture for how things have changed - and I’m getting that!

I hope to have the results ready next week.

I have gotten such an amazing response to my little survey on library education that I had to pay for a SurveyMonkey account - which means I’ll probably create a more in-depth survey to really get to the meat of what we’re all learning in library school - keep an eye out.

Lately, I’ve been talking to students at other library schools as well as library staff here as I do a bit of homework for my “What I Learned in Library School” post. I realized that I needed a bit more information so I’ve created a 5 question survey for library students and librarians.

If you could help me out by answering this tini tiny survey that would be very helpful. I will of course, share my results here.

[update] WOW! What a response. I was limited with my free account to 100 answers and you all hit that very very quickly. I have upgraded my account, so if you weren’t able to get your survey submitted, you can now. [/update]

[update2] With over 500 responses, I have closed the survey, I am going to clean up the data (make school names consistent and add a few classes that a lot of you mentioned) and then post the results - keep an eye out. [/update2]

Technorati Tags: library school, learning, education

I just called my husband into the room to share in my momentous occasion. I have submitted my final MLIS paper ever!!! That’s right folks, while I do not have my final grades yet, the work is done!!! Now I can come home from work and veg if I want to, I can spend my Saturday mornings relaxing on my new deck and reading a good book, I can go on vacation and leave the laptop at home (well - that may be a stretch - but it’s possible).

Once it’s officially official I will let you all know. I am also working on a “What I Learned in Library School” post - so keep an eye out.

A post at Tame the Web by Juliette Loebl (an MLIS student) makes me a bit jealous!

I am not tech-savvy. I would never hire myself to design a professional-looking website, or create a complex database. Yet, during the last year and a half, in library school, I have had the opportunity to experiment with new technology. Like my classmates, I have read enough Library Crunch , The Shifted Librarian, Tame the Web, Librarian in Black , to now nonchalantly toss out terms like, Open API, Casey Bisson's WPopac, and open source . In my time at Dominican, I learned HTML, Dreamweaver, Greenstone Software for the creation of online digital galleries), I wrote clunky metadata and contrasted that with tagging, I created wikis for class projects, joined MySpace, and I fell in love with a the slightly clunky beta version of Google Docs and calendars.

How cool is that? When people ask me what I’m learning in library school I frequently comment on the fact that I’m shocked at how few of the new technologies we’re using. As an online student I depend heavily on a clunky (not Firefox friendly) portal and Blackboard (which has a discussion board that reminds me of the 90s). Many of my classmates seem not to know about Web 2.0 tools and aren’t being introduced to them.

In my management class this past term we had to do a group project and it was me (not the curriculum) that introduced many of my fellow group mates (I think a few were already aware) to collaborative work spaces. We put together our notes and added comments to the document by using WriteWith.

Our cataloging professor asked us if we would like to use a wiki to keep track of useful tools and a few class members felt that this was a great idea! She set it up and no one (except for me - at last check) has added any content.

Why is that? Why aren’t we given the chance to (or encouraged to) experiment with new tools - and when given the opportunity why are so many students leaving it up to others to do the experimenting?

Maybe in my case it’s because many of my classmates (like myself) have full time (or part time) jobs and responsibilities at home in addition to their school work - who knows. All I know is that either I’m taking the wrong classes or Drexel is a bit behind the times when it comes to using new tools.

Without realizing it, my classmates and I have adjusted quickly to the expectations of this Library 2.0 world. Suddenly, writing a paper without the ability to hyperlink or comment feels incorrect, cumbersome, and a lot like busywork. A twenty-page research paper has lost its purpose without reflective discussion imbedded directly in the document. Web 2.0 has dramatically changed our expectations for the work we do. Perhaps we are now spoiled with the sense of self-importance that this interconnectedness has allowed; nevertheless, it is the reality that we have embraced. Information in a vacuum"”like a simple print document, or a password restricted Blackboard posting, does not provide the strong context for learning that open posting or a wiki can. In my just-under-two years at Dominican University, words that used to form concise and meaningful sentences have now taken on a blurry, complex significance. Words like scholarly, authoritative, information, online resources, research paper, document, library, and librarian, have weighty and multifaceted connotations. Web 2.0 has changed these concepts into dynamic, experiential abstractions. In this constantly shifting framework, both new and experienced librarians will struggle between the security of the older definitions, and the excitement of the future.

I’m very happy for Juliette and her classmates - and wish I was able to take some of the classes they’re taking!!

Technorati Tags: library school, library 2.0

I have just received my grades for my third term - straight A’s! Now I have one more term (starting on the 25th) and then I’ll have my MLIS! Boy, will that be a relief!

I have submitted all of my finals! That means I have time to read and time to write again Keep and eye out as I catch up on everything I’ve missed.

Homework & Finals Pile
Originally uploaded by nengard

Lately all I’ve had time to do is write my finals. I have a legal pathfinder, a legal final exam (all essays), a cataloging exam (10 questions), a cataloging project (4 originally cataloged records) and a paper on how to apply six sigma to a library! This is my pile of books & computer. I usually put things like this when I need them out of the way.

See more pictures on my Flickr page.

I’ve been talking to a lot of new people lately - students and librarians alike - and in those talks, something has become very clear to me - no one is teaching people the simple techniques to keep up with our profession. I’m not talking about the power user style of keeping up (subscribing to hundreds of feeds), I’m talking about the basics of library journals. In my program I have only had one professor encourage us to read American Libraries (she even emailed us the online version every time it came out). I had one professor point us to digital library journals (in my digital libraries class) and others have pointed us to the databases where we can find library specific articles. What about the journals most libraries subscribe to?

At my last library there was an internal routing list that anyone could sign up for. There were over 100 journals routing around the library and only 3 or 4 people were subscribed to Library Journal - only 5 or 6 to Computers in Libraries and similarly small numbers on the other journals that crossed my desk. Here at my new library I’m not sure who’s reading what. Most journals are stored in our staff lounge for us to read as we please (and I don’t know people well enough yet to share their reading habits with you all).

People are always in awe at how some bloggers keep up with everything - and yet they don’t practice the simplest of tricks - read the journals that your library subscribes to. Take them to lunch with you if you don’t have time during the work day - or if you have down time on the circ or reference desk, read them there.

But back to my original point - why aren’t our professors telling us about these small pockets of information? Why isn’t it required in some of my classes to keep up with library news - why is it that there are students who haven’t even heard of Library Journal (or other similar titles)? The best place to learn about these tools is in library school - where (almost certainly) you’ll have access to many (if not all) of the library journals that are available.

Seems silly to me that we spend our days learning about theory that will only relate to our jobs in the remotest way - but not about the tools that will help us keep up with our profession once we graduate.

Technorati Tags: library journals, library school

In addition to everything else, I have finished registering for my summer classes - my last term!!

This term I’m taking:

• Information Services in Orgs (Info 643)
• Library Automation (Info 664)
• Medical Bibliography (Info 675)

Should be interesting!

So, spring term starts on Monday! It’s my 3rd of 4 terms and then I’ll have my MLIS!

This term I’m taking:

• Managing Information Orgs (Info 640)
• Legal Bibliography (Info 681)
• Cataloging & Classification I (Info 660)

It’s going to be a pretty heavy workload - but I’m looking forward to it - specifically the management class. Stay tuned for for updates throughout the term.

I have written and submitted one term paper and have written and need to edit the other!! It was a productive 4 day weekend.

I have taken off of work for a long weekend to finish my term papers. Starting after work today I will be in serious writing mode (I hope). I’m writing a Review of Literature on Undergraduate Information Seeking Habits when applied to web resources - not sure what the title will be. I’m also writing about Open Source & Web 2.0 in Digital Libraries. Should be a couple of interesting topics - My reading is done and my notes are started - now I have 4 straight days (minus taking the pup outside to play in the snow) to get the rough drafts done.

Yikes! I just noticed that one of the classes I was going to take is either full or not offered anymore - so now I’m in a pickle.

This was what I wanted for summer:

• Managing Information Orgs (Info 640)
• Information Services in Orgs (Info 643)
• Library Automation (Info 664)

But I’m going to have to change that because I’m going to take this in the spring:

• Managing Information Orgs (Info 640)
• Legal Bibliography (Info 681)
• Cataloging & Classification I (Info 660)

So now I have to find out what to do this summer:

• Information Services in Orgs (Info 643)
• Library Automation (Info 664)
• ????

I know you don’t know how to help me - but I just thought I’d share. I’ll be registering tomorrow morning - let’s just hope I have internet - and power The snow is supposed to get bad - we’ll see if the weather man is right.

Back in July I plotted out my entire MLIS program - but it looks like one of my spring classes has been canceled. So now I need to pick between these - what do you think?

• INFO 681 - Legal Bibliography
  Introduces the fundamentals of legal research, including sources and research strategies.

• INFO 622 - Content Representation
  Focuses on fundamental decisions in designing subject access systems and alternative approaches to indexing. Explores current issues in content representation: principles of subject analysis; natural language vs. vocabulary control; manual, computer-assisted, and automatic indexing; faceted indexing and classification systems; image indexing and retrieval; indexing and the World Wide Web. Includes evaluation of indexer consistency and indexing system performance.

• INFO 688 - Instr Role Info Specialist
  Examines the instructional role of the information professional. Emphasizes the planning, implementation, and evaluation of instruction for the purpose of information education.

I’ll be taking one of these alongside these 2:

• INFO 608 - Human-Computer Interaction
• INFO 660 - Cataloging & Classification I

I’m up for suggestions.

Check out Lifehacker’s list of Note taking sites & tools.

That’s right - my Digital Libraries professor has asked my classmates to read my blog post on The New Shape of Knowledge (my summary of David Weinberger’s presentation from KMWorld) - that’s pretty darn neat!!

On a side note - I have also published this post in the DUSLA (Drexel University SLA Student Chapter) Newsletter that will be available next week sometime.

That’s right - flu’s gone, homework is up to date - and I’m going to stay on top of things this week!!

This happened last term too - the first week is what I’m going to call “Panic Week”. The term started on Monday and I’ve been running around like a Chicken with it’s head cut off trying to get into the swing of things - I’ll probably be quiet for a bit - but I do have lots to share with you all - so stick around

My second term starts in 4 days. Here’s my course load:

• Action Research and Statistics INFO-515-901
• Info Resources & Services II INFO-511-905
• Digital Libraries INFO-653-900

The first 2 are required the third is my first elective - should be a busy term!