Hi Everybody! After a long hiatus, it feels great to be back in the world of blogging! It’s about time I provide you with an update on what I’ve been up to over the past while. When I last wrote here, I knew that I really wanted to have a career in librarianship, and had registered for the “Master of Library and Information Studies” program at Dalhousie University. I only had a vague idea of what my potential classes would look like, and of the range of careers that would potentially be available. I started following blogs written by librarians and library students, and visited every library I could during my time in Europe. Signing back into my WordPress account a few moments ago, I found it exciting to look through the librarian blogs I’m following, and realize that I now have a much better sense of what they’re talking about. While I still have a lot to learn, I have come pretty far since this past summer! So here is a bit of information about what my semester has looked like.
Within the first week of classes, I got to know my fellow classmates quite well through tons of orientation events. There are about 32 of us all starting out in this program, and 7 out of our 8 first-year courses are all together (as opposed to us having different options for classes). We all got pretty comfortable to walking up to each other as strangers and striking up a conversation as the week went on. A fair amount of my classmates are from the Maritime provinces, some from Ontario, about a handful of us are from Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan, and there are a few international students as well. One of the highlights of the first week was a boat cruise held for the students in the Management department – while I had expected a ferry or cruise ship, it was actually a gorgeous sailboat from which we got to watch the sunset.
Shortly before the semester started, I secured a job as a tutor at the Dalhousie Writing Centre – I did between 11 and 15 hours a week at this job, and will continue working there next semester. Students will make appointments to come and work on their papers in 30 minute or hour long sessions; my job is to go over the paper with them and help them make it into a more cohesive and clear piece of writing. Each student and paper is so unique; while some students will come in with papers that need a lot of grammatical work, sometimes it will be more about making sure that each argument fits in with the thesis. Some students come in multiple times in the weeks leading up to a due date, while some come in hours before they have to hand an assignment in. The most difficult part of the job is to not just “edit” work for students, but to instead help them make their own changes.
In October I took on a second job as a “Curriculum Map Editor”, which only takes up 4-5 hours a week. There is a website being created where all of the required courses for a program are listed, and when students select a specific course they can see all of the “Student Learning Outcomes” associated with that course. My job is to examine a course syllabus, create a list of the “Student Learning Outcomes” for an individual class, and send a list of these to the professor of that class. The professor then tells me if they approve of this list or not, and then I enter the material on the website. This job has been quite interesting, but will probably end sometime in January.
But back to the library stuff! The amount of different library associations that the school supports was slightly overwhelming – I knew that I wanted to get involved in an association or two, but didn’t want to become too busy either. In the end, I joined CAPAL (the Canadian Association of Professional and Academic Librarians) – this association has been a pretty minimal commitment so far. I have partaken in an event held by the CLA (Canadian Library Association) where you are set up with a mentor that is a working librarian. I have been lucky enough to meet with my mentor twice – she graduated from the MLIS program in 2011, and she has given me lots of advice on what to expect in the working world. Another student association is the SLA (Special Library Association) and they have offered opportunities such as taking tours of unique libraries. Last month, we were given a tour of a library that specializes in resources for children that have seeing or hearing issues. There were books in brail, textbooks with especially large font, and a large selection of modified toys. I have become involved in a conference that is run by Dalhousie MLIS students – it is called “Information Without Borders” and is held in February. This year, the theme of the conference is the interaction between climate change and information management. My role is the “incoming financial and fundraising chair” for this conference – there is a second-year student who is the “outgoing”, and she has been teaching me about how to handle the finances. This semester, we have been spending time sending letters to different groups requesting sponsorship, and next semester we will focus more on accumulating donations for a silent auction to raise funds for the conference. We get together for meetings every second week (although in the new year it will be every week) and it has been interesting to see the different aspects of the conference come together – from establishing the different speakers to organizing the catering for the conference, to setting up registration. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know everyone involved in organizing the conference, and the group has been very supportive at each stage.
My courses covered a wide range of aspects of librarianship. I had to take four this semester: “Information Management Systems”, “Information Sources and Retrieval”, “Organization of Information”, and “Information in Society”. “Info Management Systems” focussed namely on technology, and in this course we studied things like Wikipedia, website and iPhone app designing, and the history of certain technological developments. “Info Sources and Retrieval” revolved around the idea of a reference interview, where individuals come with specific questions they want help with. While many people think that this job is practically unnecessary thanks to Google, the ability to use specific databases or books can help ensure that information and results are relevant for what an individual needs. I was a bit intimidated by this class in the beginning, but thanks to repetitive research work in the assignments, I now think that I can search fairly effectively on different databases, including legal, medical, and historical ones. “Organization of Information” was an introduction to things such as cataloguing information items to make them easily retrievable, and describing these items in an effective way. “Information in Society” was a class that involved a lot of talk about Facebook, Google, and Twitter (is it okay for Facebook to conduct social experiments without peoples’ knowledge? Do people have the right to have their past actions be forgotten? Is there a barrier still existing between the public life and the private life?). We discussed issues regarding information and libraries, such as censorship on computers (children should not be at risk of accidentally seeing pornography on a computer, but people should be able to discern appropriate resources for themselves instead of being censored), as well as ethics of sharing certain information (for example, if a depressed child comes to a library and asks for books on committing suicide, should the librarian provide that information?). I found all of these classes extremely interesting, and am excited to see what next semester is like!
Along with my regular courses, I have had quite a few opportunities for learning. I attended a 6 hour seminar on how to do HTML coding, which was really interesting. I have also taken a few short lessons on working with Geographic Information Systems, which enables me to design maps on computers using certain software. There have been several interesting guest lectures offered through my program, including a lecture on the future of “bitcoin” technology (virtual money), a lecture on “why the book is always better than the movie”, one on copyright issues, and one that was presented by a man that spent time mapping Inuit trade routes through the Arctic. Also, a few public and academic librarians came to describe their work and particular projects to us.
Since having been home for the holidays, I have been lucky enough to do a job shadow at both an academic library and the Calgary Courthouse library. I am finding the people in the librarian field to be extremely friendly and helpful, and have appreciated getting to know fellow graduates of the program who are willing to share advice and tips. I find the multiple areas of librarianship to be daunting; I could become a law librarian, work in archives, be a medical librarian, work in a public library or academic library, or work in a corporate setting. In a way, I wish I could do it all, but I suppose the key is to be open to different opportunities and then see what aspects of each area of work appeal most to me. I am in the process of setting up a 3-week practicum involving cataloguing at the University of Calgary in April, so I hope that will all work out and lead to an interesting experience! Also, I am very happy to say that I have been hired for a job as a Records and Information Management Summer Student at Arc Resources in Calgary. That will take place from May until August, and I am very much looking forward to it.
So there you have it. I hope I haven’t bored you too much in describing everything about my first semester at library school!
Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a fantastic New Year!
Bye for now,
Robyn
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