best line of my LIS education

in my information retrieval class discussing different forms of truncation

“i had some embedded truncation during a movie last night.
i took a nap.”

funny and a good prof!

of all the things i need to do, updating this blog is the most fun…

… but maybe not the best use of my time.

to do today:

• finish berloody CAIS proposal so that i can tell folks about chat reference in SL (don’t get me wrong, i really wanna go and think my research is interesting – but CFPs kill me)
• wade through the pile of amazing submissions to Library Student Journal and tell some very patient authors that they are about to be published
• begin reading Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and techniques for analyzing business competition by Fleisher & Bensoussan. (I’m told it’s an oldie but a goodie.)
• finish Everything is Miscellaneous because it was recalled by the library and due last Friday – which means I already owe 4$.
• wrap my head around Blair’s “futility point” [David C. Blair, "Searching Biases in Large Interactive Document Retrieval Systems," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 31 (July 1980)] and what this means in terms of current information retrieval
• listen to some Feist and P Funk (ya, that’s how I roll)

okay.

here i go.

bye!

recent LIS grads – smarten up!

had some interesting chats with library muckety-mucks over the holidays, trying to figure out what people are looking for from recent LIS graduates.

from what i can tell it all boils down to one thing: professionalism.

• don’t send in a 1 page c.v.
• in your letter of application, make links between what the job is looking for and how you can meet those needs.
• don’t dress like a schlub at the interview.
• if you’re not interested in teaching, you better be interested in cataloguing.
• have something to say about current practice at the organization – or the very least about their website! (and not “it’s great – i wouldn’t change a thing!”)

this all sounds very basic but of the three muckety-mucks i spoke to, all mentioned that recent grads don’t seem to get that they are now starting their career, not another part-time “who cares?” gig, and should present themselves as such.

end of term thoughts

this week at Library Student Journal i posed a question about the focus of MLIS programs: too much theory or too much practice? last night in Second Life i was speaking with a group of librarians – some were newly minted, others were old pros – asking what they thought was most important. everyone seemed to agree that theory was important (“that’s why you’re at university – to use your brain”) but that the hands-on was also essential. “two sides to the same coin.” but i’m concerned about this dichotomy – or maybe it’s a continuum?

there is a divide between theory and practice in the LIS discipline, and i fear this has an impact on students, one that will see the discipline offically split down the middle – where only those interested in theory will get an MLIS (a two year program) and those interested in practice will get library tech degrees (also a two year program). (and i am by no means denegrating library tech degrees, but the supposed difference between that and an MLIS is the inclusion of theory for MLIS students). this split will hurt both the creation of theory and the advancement of the profession. if the LIS field continues to be presented as either “you can do a PhD” or “you can work in a library” then there’s no wonder the divide exists!

so i have been thinking about theory and practice as part of a continuous cycle. one must fuel the other. the two are part of each other, and push each other re-evaluate their parts.

if web 2.0 is concerned with collaboration, constant re-evaluation and the (web) user, and library 2.0 is concerned with collaboration, constant re-evaluation and the (library) user, then why can’t we have LIS 2.0, concerned with collaboration, constant re-evaluation and the (LIS-lover) user?

so as i sit here trying to get a move on, and finish these two assignments, i’m determined to figure out the best way to apply some theory to these two very practice-related papers (meeting report recommendations in a hospital library, and addressing the knowledge management needs of a military organization). the LIS city of practice was built on theory.

(my city, naturally, was built on rock n’roll.)

someday soon i’ll be a librarian and i want to make sure that i’m not thinking in terms of the theory-practice dichotomy, because it doesn’t really exist.