New library community site: LibGig

Today I came across a new site that has the potential to become an important resource for library-folk:

Sections include job postings, info about ALA-accredited schools, and social networking tools for information professionals. From the site:

LibGig is a new professional networking website dedicated to bringing together everyone who accesses, organizes, creates, manages, produces or distributes information for a living.

Our goal is to establish a common, human link within the enormous and multi-faceted information industry through dialogue, interaction and sharing of interesting stories, as well as dynamic and exclusive content that encourages feedback and debate.

How I found my summer job

I thought I’d say a few words about how I landed my summer job. Working in Ottawa for the summer is a popular choice for Canadian students, especially for those of us who attend school in the eastern part of the country (since, as we all know, Canada’s really big). The federal government encourages students by helping to arrange for us to find three- to four-month full-time positions with federal organizations, often not just related to our fields but actually quite tremendous opportunities, that employers would likely never offer us on the free market. This is how I ended up working for the federal government this summer.

My interview (which was mercifully over the phone, since Montreal is close but not THAT close to Ottawa) was not actually for the position I ended up with. My name had been selected from the FSWEP pool as a candidate for a reference position at the Industry Canada library in downtown Ottawa. When I accepted their offer of an interview, I was fully aware of two major problems, but I was happy enough to have been offered an interview that I didn’t worry too much. The first problem was that the job required me to be bilingual, and the second was that my French is quite weak. When the interview finally took place, they asked me five questions, to which I gave four rather good responses and one embarrassingly bad one; indeed, the interviewers seemed quite impressed with all of my answers except the one in French (though they were certainly nice enough about it).

Now, I’ve hunted for summer jobs enough times to know that my first interview of the season is not usually my best, so I chalked it up as a practice run and expected not to hear from Industry Canada again. To my surprise, a few weeks later I received a call from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which is a very small part of Industry Canada, and they wanted to know whether I would accept a position at the CIPO Resource Centre in Gatineau, immediately across the bridge from downtown Ottawa. Apparently IC had liked me enough that they’d passed my name on to CIPO, where they were looking for a summer student for a non-bilingual position.

Anyway, it’s been a great experience so far – and it’s hard to believe the summer is almost halfway through!

ILSS Book Club: Library 2.0 and Beyond

I spent the weekend at my parents’ house in Toronto to see my brother, who’s visiting from Vancouver. The train ride from Ottawa takes about four and a half hours, which was plenty of time to make my way through the short but sweet Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User, edited by Nancy Courtney.

This collection of articles revolves around the ideas of (surprise, surprise) Library 2.0. For those who don’t know and can’t wait to open the book for a more detailed explanation, Library 2.0 is essentially the application of Web 2.0 tools (and more importantly, Web 2.0 concepts) in libraries as a way to become more responsive to the needs of the user community. For those unfamiliar with Web 2.0, I’ll direct you to Wikipedia, but here’s a hint: leave a comment on this blog post, and you’re participating in it!

One major strength of the book is that each article tackles a certain tool by first explaining how it is typically used on the web and then providing specific details of how it could be used in a library setting. As such, it will satisfy readers with a general interest in the future directions of libraries as well as librarians looking for advice they can put to use immediately.

Highlights for me include Looking Toward Catalog 2.0 by Michael Casey, which discusses improving library catalogue interfaces by taking advice from Google and Amazon.com; The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries by Chad F. Boeninger, which covers the use of wikis for internal communication, institutional collaboration, and research guides, as well as suggesting best practices for library wikis; and Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski, which weighs the pros and cons of user-based categorization and offers examples of libraries that have already made use of tagging.

So if you’re interested in where libraries are headed (or at least where they will hopefully be headed soon), I recommend Library 2.0 and Beyond – even if you’re not trying to pass the time on a boring train ride.

The ILSS takes on the Marginal (or perhaps vice versa)

I just wanted to let everyone know that the Spring 2008 issue of the Marginal is now available online. In its own words, the Marginal is “an e-zine published by The McGill Library and Information Studies Student Association (MLISSA),” and it features the reflections, poems, and other writings of students at SIS. Before you ask, yes, the ILSS is featured, but sadly, the material won’t be new to my faithful readers. At any rate, it’s definitely worth taking a look, and for extra credit, check out the history of the Marginal.

Alive and well in Ottawa

I realize I haven’t posted in what, by blogging standards, is a very long time, but don’t fret. I’ve just been setting myself up in Ottawa, where I have a summer job working for the Canadian Intellectual Property Office Resource Centre. To be honest, I’d never put much thought into working in a government library before being offered this job, but I recognized it as a terrific opportunity. I found the position (or to be more accurate, it found me) through the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP), which is an absolute must for Canadian students and students studying in Canada looking for a summer job.

I will post more about the job soon, but for now I will show you how pretty Ottawa is in May (click for more Ottawa photos in my Flickr stream):

Story of my life

I’m happy to report that I’ve completed my first year of library school, and at the moment I’m spending some time with my parents in Toronto before I start my summer job in Ottawa on May 1st. Looking back over my year, I decided that now would be a good time to write a personal post about my experiences leading up to my MLIS program. I’m not sure that my story is typical of library school students, but then again, it seems that we come from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds.

I received my BA in psychology from UBC in the spring of 2006 (two whole years ago - wow!). At that point, I had never considered library school; I was vaguely aware of the field of “library science,” but I had no idea that being a librarian required a Master’s degree. To be perfectly honest, my main use of the public library was as a free DVD rental service, and I only went to the UBC libraries when I was performing research that couldn’t be done through their online services.

Upon graduation, my plan was to pursue graduate studies in social psychology. Fortunately, the other part of my plan was to take a year off, in order to write the dreaded GREs, put some time into my grad school applications, and then spend the rest of the year living in Paris and working on my French. I say fortunately because, looking back, I now realize how important that year was in terms of figuring out what I really wanted to do with myself. In many ways that year was disappointing (I spent months studying for a test that I didn’t end up needing at all, and I had to cut my time in Europe short), but it was entirely necessary, and I would implore anyone thinking about going straight from undergrad to grad school to consider taking some time off in between.

Shortly before the application deadlines, I was struck with a rather unsettling notion - perhaps psychology was not the right field of study for me. After close to four years of preparing for a career as a psych professor, I suddenly realized that I wanted a grad school experience that would leave me with a wider variety of options. Around that time, I also stumbled upon a t-shirt for sale from one of my favourite webcomics, Questionable Content. Here I am last August, just before heading off to library school, wearing this supremely nerdy shirt:

No joke - that’s really how the idea of library school occurred to me. I saw it on a t-shirt design.

Fortunately, I still had time to apply. I actually didn’t spend much time comparing schools. I’d been wanting to live in Montreal for a long time, and I knew McGill was a prestigious school (in general, not necessarily for its library school in particular), so it was my first choice and in early 2007 I was accepted.

Whew. I think that’s enough for now, but at some point I will move on to my reflections about library school itself. I hope the weather is as nice where you are as it is in Toronto right now!

Gaming in libraries

I came across an interesting post today about gaming in libraries. Indeed, it seems to be a divisive issue: some feel that computer games take away attention from reading, while others feel that they can be an important way to get teens in the door. This article in particular caught my attention because it provides stats from a number of different sources and suggests that gaming programs really do promote reading (from The Shifted Librarian):

there is indeed evidence that kids who come to the library for gaming also use the book collection more.

• See the April 2007 issue of the ILA Reporter in which Amy Alessio from the Schaumburg Township District Library notes circulation of the teen collection has gone up 70% due to an increase in teen-oriented activities, which includes gaming (p.31)
• At ALA’s 2008 Midwinter Meeting, Julie Scordato from the Columbus Metropolitan Library gave a presentation with some evidence, starting on slide 6.
• Read Carver’s Bay: Gaming the Way to Literacy on the WebJunction site
• I wrote the new issue of Library Technology Reports about Gaming in Libraries, and I specifically included a case study about a middle school in Virginia that has tied gaming to the statewide reading club, which doubled the number of participants in the first year.

Trying Twitter

I was never interested in Twitter because, well, I don’t care what my Internet friends had for breakfast. But in the spirit of not knocking it until I’ve tried it, I’ve set up an account. The only problem is that I have no one to Twitter to (no followers, as Twitterites call it), so if anyone wants to know about the things in my life that are too brief (not more than 140 characters at a time) or just not quite inspired enough to merit a blog post, then I encourage you to add me. Follow me, and I promise not to lead you astray.

The book isn’t dead after all

Good news for everyone who loves books or loves it when other people love books: a recent study found that only 9% of Americans read no books in a typical year, while 37% read more than ten books (via LISNews):

There are certain groups who are more likely to read more than ten books in an average year. Looking at the generations, almost half (47%) of Matures (those aged 63 and older) say they read more than ten books compared to just one-third (33%) of Baby Boomers (those aged 44-62). Women are also more likely to read more than men – 44 percent of women read more than ten books a year compared to three in ten (29%) men. Candidates may not want to try books to reach their partisans, but they may be a good way to reach out to Independents. Just one-third of Republicans (33%) and Democrats (35%) say they read more than ten books in a year compared to 44 percent of Independents.

ILSS Book Club: The NextGen Librarian’s Survival Guide

Today’s selection covers many of the usual issues covered by library career books, but it tackles the issue of how today’s young recent grads relate to the library world. The NextGen Librarian’s Survival Guide by Rachel Singer Gordon is a recent (2006) book that draws advice from interviews with librarians as well as responses to a pair of surveys: the Under-40 Survey and the Over-40 Survey. The results of these surveys are used to compare how younger and older librarians feel about the role of young librarians in the field today.

For the purposes of the book, Gordon declares “NextGen librarians” to be those who are part of Generation X and Generation Y - that is, anyone born between 1965 and 2000 (though these dates are up for debate). Now, even assuming that we’re not really talking about 8-year-old librarians, this seems like an awfully wide age range to me. I’m not convinced that information professionals in their early forties have more in common with those in their early twenties than with those in their early fifties, but naturally it’s difficult to accurately capture a generational trend.

A brief chapter on “Surviving Library School” directs the reader to some appropriate online resources and gives helpful advice on how to make the most of your time as a student. Gordon emphasizes the importance of becoming involved with professional associations and gaining work experience before graduation.

Subsequent chapters include “Surviving the Job Hunt” and “Surviving Entry-Level Positions.” Each starts with a list of bullet points outlining the issues unique to NextGen librarians, but the vast majority of the content would be useful to students and recent graduates of any age. Maybe my generation is so self-absorbed that we can’t imagine anyone having different patterns of thinking, but in general I feel that this book is more about students graduating in the 21st century than it is about professionals who were born in a certain era. At any rate, I found it to be helpful, and I would recommend it to all current students and recent graduates.