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.

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.