Come view the fruit of my labor, part II

I spent part of the summer (a very small part, really, due to being extremely busy) processing the archives of the North American Coalition for Christianity and Ecology for the Yale Divinity School Library's special collection. The finding aid for the archives, created by me and edited by special collections librarian Martha Smalley, is here. (Not sure how accessible this is without a library proxy of some sort, unfortunately, and the part with my name on it spits out an error. But it is there!)

And! The libguide on patristic exegesis I created for IST 605 has been adapted for use in an actual library, again (of course) YDSL. It is much expanded and should be useful as a launching point for anyone doing research in early Christianity. Check it out here.

Come view the fruit of my labor

For our final project in IST 605 we created LibGuide pathfinders on topics of our choice as lists of reference aids for library patrons. Mine is on the nerd-o-rific subject of patristic exegesis (early Christian biblical interpretation):

http://demo.libguides.com/patristicexegesis

Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions. This will become part of my portfolio, and my hope is it will be used by an actual library in some modified form.

What I'm going to do with that

One nice thing about getting an MLS is that, unlike everything else I've gone to school for, when I tell people what I'm studying people don't ask "What are you going to DO with that?" Granted, I previously studied English (kind of useful), classical Greek and Latin (not a lot of Greeks and Romans I can talk to), and religious studies (perhaps useful, but if you're studying religion people think it's because you want to be ordained and, well, I'm female and Catholic, so, hmm). So in comparison, my MLS is obviously a professional degree, and most people think being a librarian is a legitimate job, although there are always those who think Google is going to make librarians obsolete.

I don't know if I should be ashamed to mention that I first applied to library school more than a decade ago, straight out of college. I got in, but I wasn't sure what kind of grad school I wanted to do, so I got a job in the Real World and decided after about two weeks that I would rather be in grad school. So I went to grad school, blasted through my masters and my coursework and exams for my PhD, then realized I didn't want to write a dissertation. After dithering around for a few years, having a baby, etc., I decided to get my MLS. That makes me sound flaky, doesn't it? And for a while there I was kicking myself that I didn't go straight to library school out of college and save myself ten years of dithering.

But now, aside from the fact that the path I took that led me across the country and brought two really wonderful people, my husband and my daughter, into my life, I realize that this path actually prepared me well to do the very specific thing I want to do. For one thing: subject specialists in academic libraries are usually supposed to have at least a masters degree in addition to the MLS. Check! For another, maybe I'm just a slow learner or maybe it took me more than one graduate department to find my groove, but I really learned a lot about my discipline, and how to do scholarship within it, while I was working toward my PhD.

I had the opportunity to observe Suzanne Estelle-Holmer and Amy Limpitlaw, reference librarians at the Yale Divinity School Library, for my reference class (IST 605) this semester. It's not a busy reference desk, as so many public and academic reference desks are, but they do field a lot of tricky questions from scholars and other patrons outside the Yale community, as well as helping students write research papers in patristics and biblical studies. I was able to help out with a couple of questions, and while I certainly saw skills in action that all reference librarians employ (the reference interview, for one), I answered those questions based on my previous knowledge of theology and church history. I always loved the beginning stages of research, learning introductory information on topics and tracking down sources, more than the actual writing of papers, so now I can help other people with the searching, learning more about a variety of topics in the process and building up my knowledge to help future patrons even more.

So now I have a better idea what I'm going to do with all those degrees. My dream job is essentially to do what the librarians at the div school do, although in reality I'm more likely to be a librarian in a more traditional academic environment. But in either case I'm sure the knowledge I've acquired in my earlier college experiences, as well as what I've learned about other topics I'm interested in, will help me do the job I'm training for now.

Reader response: "Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library"

Note: This is an assignment I submitted for IST 511. I couldn't find anything about social networking at theological libraries, but I think a small campus library is a similar enough environment that if I do find a job in a seminary/div school library, I will be able to apply the authors' experiences to my own situation.

In “Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library,” Jason D. Cooper and Alan May describe the use of Web 2.0 technologies by the library faculty at Montevallo University, a small public liberal arts university in Alabama. The authors demonstrate how a small academic library with limited personnel, financial resources, and in-house technical expertise can take advantage of freely available Web 2.0 software to serve its users and promote library resources to the campus community.

The library’s experiments with Web 2.0 began in 2006, when two technical services librarians proposed the idea of a library blog to the library’s director. Given enthusiastic authorization to proceed, the librarians created a blog on Blogger.com which eventually included five librarian co-bloggers. The librarians used the blog to publicize new databases, announce important information such as a library closing due to a power outage, and promote readings and other library events. The director also used the blog to respond to patron comments solicited in the biannual LibQual survey. To collect data about blog usage, the bloggers tracked the number of visits, visitor location, visit duration, and other information with Google Analytics, finding that the blog received several thousand views each month, most of them, predictably, within close proximity to campus.

Following the blog’s success, the librarians experimented with other Web 2.0 technologies. They generated a custom RSS feed with ListGarden for new browsing items, creating a web page for the display of the 50 most recent items and linking them to the library’s online catalog. They also featured photos of the library and other local sights of interest on Flickr, using the geotagging feature to show where photos were taken and publishing pictures to their blog using Flickr’s RSS capabilities.

At a Library 2.0 Summit at Mississippi State University in 2007, three of the librarians met with librarians from other institutions to discuss the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies at their home libraries. Central themes included “the challenge of bringing together the many stakeholders within a large institution,” where the layers of bureaucracy can increase the time needed to approve a new program, and the importance for all libraries, given the public nature of Web 2.0 technologies, of “cultivat[ing] an atmosphere of trust among those who represent the institution in online spaces and among the directors and administrators who oversee their work” (p. 94).

The librarians who attended the summit continue to discuss the implementation of Library 2.0 at their home institutions on social networking sites such as Ning and Facebook. The authors summarize the significance of the Montevallo librarians’ experiences for libraries of all kinds, especially smaller academic libraries: “The software and Web tools described here are readily available to libraries of all sizes and budgets. Librarians should work with their directors and administrators to employ these tools as part of their ongoing efforts to effectively serve their campus communities” (p. 95).

Cooper, J. D. and May, A. (2009). Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library. Technical Services Quarterly, 26(2), 89-95.