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.

Distance learning: how it is easy, how it is not

Since it's about the middle of the semester, at least according to my syllabi and to people I know at other schools who have fall breaks, I've decided to do a couple of mid-semester inventories. This will be about the distance learning experience, which is entirely new to me.

What do I like about it? At Syracuse, courses are taught in an asynchronous format, which was a great selling point to me, because it means I don't have to be at the computer at any particular time. (If I take an online course from another school through WISE later in my program, which is certainly a possibility, I will have to conform to the requirements of whatever school offers the course, so this might be different in the future, at least for a semester.) This was a huge selling point of the iSchool for me; I have a two-year-old daughter and I do most of the childcare in our family, at least for the time being, so I appreciate the flexible schedule. I particularly like the asynchronous format of discussions, because I can give more time to formulating my contributions and considering those of my classmates than I would in a traditional class, and this gives quiet people such as myself an opportunity to speak (or write) more. Nobody sits in the front or back of the classroom, and while I can go a day or two without posting, I know my absence will be noticed. I've also found my instructors engaging and accessible, and assignments are well thought out--I've spent a lot of hands-on time at my local libraries, both public and academic, observing librarians for reference and examining books for information organization.

What's hard? Well, time management is paramount, and it's always been a skill I need to improve; it's easy to go a day or two without getting anything done when real life intervenes, and nobody I see in my daily life is involved enough with my coursework, as on-campus classmates would be, to remind me about the project that's due next Tuesday. It is also, I am not going to lie, really a challenge with a kid. I know I'm not the only one in this situation by any means, and thank goodness my primary responsibility outside of school is child care and I don't have a paying job on top of that (wow, gratitude for no income!), but two-year-olds require a lot of attention and mine is no exception. So I do most of my work during naps and after bedtime, and during those times when my wonderful and helpful husband watches her for an afternoon so I can go to the library and work or interview a real live librarian. I am feeling this out as I go along, and so far I've managed to do my work, if barely, without additional child care. I am really looking forward to preschool next year, I can tell you that.

My last post was about the NYLA conference, which I'm really glad I attended, and I think I'll really need to attend conferences or SU events periodically (fortunately I am well enough positioned, geographically, to do so), in order to have real-life contact with other library students and librarians and concentrate exclusively on librarianship for at least a short period. Distance learning, augmented by social networking, has proven to be a lot more personal than I had expected, but it is still really nice to be around other like-minded adults once in a while, and of course the long-term plan is that I will be around them every day!

NYLA 2009: My first library conference!

This week I spent about a day, or two half-days, at the 2009 New York Library Association conference in Niagara Falls. The theme of the conference was "Libraries: Peace, Love & Freedom," and many of the vendors and NYLA division booths were decked with tie-dye, lava lamps, peace signs, and other hippie paraphernalia. There were also some sessions on intellectual freedom in libraries and other relevant issues, although I only made it to two panels due to time constraints. I must poke gentle fun at the theme, having lived a bit too long in Berkeley, but it was a colorful theme and I got a neat pair and a half of socks!



I volunteered at the iSchool booth when I first arrived, chatting with prospective students and alumni. I also attended two conference sessions. One was a panel of representatives from library schools around the state, talking about what's going on in their programs. Megan Oakleaf, my professor for 605, represented Syracuse and discussed the cooperative projects between students and libraries in IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, & Assessment, which I'll be taking next semester. I'm glad I went to that, because it got me thinking about what I might do for my project. I also went to a session on Living History Through Social Networking, which discussed the use of social networking tools to teach information literacy. See the wiki here. I learned a lot about Twitter especially that I didn't already know, and now I have a better idea of how to use it both personally and professionally.

The best part of the conference was the SU reception for students, faculty, and alumni on Thursday night. Not just because of the wine! but also because I got to meet alumni and other students. As a distance student, it's easy to feel isolated from other people, so I really enjoyed interacting with people in person, and especially meeting students who began the program this fall on campus and are in roughly the same place that I am. It's also interesting to hear perspectives on how courses are taught in person vs. online.

It also occurred to me that conferences are like the gateway week in the summer (or maybe it's the other way around!) - you can get away from the distractions of daily life for a few days (and I've discovered as I go on how many distractions we distance students have, especially jobs, families, and kids) and dive head first into the exciting world of librarianship. It's really invigorating; as I did after IST 511, I came home full of ideas and enthusiasm for the path I'm headed down. I also discovered that sections of NYLA such as ASLS (academic and special libraries) have their own little conferences, and the ASLS is having theirs in my husband's hometown of Ithaca next June, so I have a lot more of these to look forward to!

Fall semester courses: IST 605, Information Resources: Users and Services

The other core course I'm taking this semester is Information Resources: Users and Services, or Reference for short, but what we've already learned is that when it comes to the actual job of a reference librarian, "reference" is only one of many duties one might need to perform. We spent the first week of discussion looking at current job listings for reference librarians and compiling a list of skills and responsibilities required for the jobs. These skill areas included collection development, instruction, web development, management, and a whole host of other skills--often in one job! The good news is that even people like me who don't have a lot of library experience have probably developed some of these skills in other contexts, and for those who have a lot of interests, specialization is certainly not going to be a limitation. The more challenging aspect is that there are a lot of skills for reference librarians to master, and (it appears) hardly enough hours in the day for one person to do so many tasks.

I really have no idea if reference is an area I want to work in, but it's certainly a strong possibility I will staff a reference desk at some point in my professional career, so I'm looking forward to this class.

Fall semester courses: IST 616, Information Resources, Organization and Management

I'm enrolled in two core courses for my my first semester of completely online courses. IST 616 is on information organization and access, which is a topic that both intrigues and baffles me. I suspect that when it comes to the choice between patron-oriented library services and technical services, I'm going to fall on the technical services side of the line (but who knows, really), and I have at least an abstract interest in cataloguing, classification, and that sort of thing. But at the same time technical services is, well, technical, and while I am good enough at coding, classifying, and other techy things when I set my mind to it, my inner humanities scholar gags a bit whenever I see too many acronyms in one place. So I am more nervous about this course than the other class I'm taking this semester (reference sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? except it's not), but I'm sure it will all make sense at the end of the semester, and I'll have a better idea if this is the sort of librarianship I want to do.