Tips for surviving library school – and possibly even having some fun

It’s back-to-school time, and although I’m not heading to any classes, the fact that campus is now swarming with students reminds me that there is a new group of students starting library school. And if these people feel half as lost and confused as I did during my first few weeks, then they could use some advice. First, take a look at Biblioblond’s Thoughts on “Back to School” for MLIS Students, where she lists her Top 5 tips for incoming students. Then, if you’re not afraid of slightly stale information, you can take a peek at my post from last September.

Now, thinking back on my two years at SIS, here’s my advice:

• Get involved with a student group. I remember when I was doing my undergrad, I thought student government and groups were totally lame, but trust me, in library school they’re worthwhile. If you’re at McGill, you can find some good info on the SIS website, and if you’re a student elsewhere, I’m sure you can find what you need online somewhere – you’re a resourceful soon-to-be information professional, after all. Figure out which group (or groups) is best aligned with your interests, and attend their first meeting. This is a great way to meet people and learn more about the field. Plus it looks terrific on a CV/resume!
• Run for the executive of a student group. Okay, so this is an extension of my last point, but it really is that important! Each student group’s website should have info about running for exec (e.g., the McGill CLA Student Chapter – pay attention to the positions that say TBA in September: that could be you!), but if you can’t find that information online, just ask someone. The first year student who becomes VP often automatically becomes President in their second year, so keep this in mind if you’d like to run the show next year.
• Go to social events organized by the student groups (or by anyone else, for that matter). In my experience, these events are usually poorly attended, but those of us who made the effort to go always had a blast.
• Keep in mind that all the other first year students feel just as nervous and lost as you do – so go up to people and introduce yourself, because everyone is trying to make friends at the beginning of the year.
• Don’t be shy to approach the second year students for help – like you, they chose this profession because they like to help people.
• And finally, here’s one for McGill students only: join the Professional Partnering Program. It’s an incredible opportunity to get to know someone who’s working in the field, and the time commitment is completely flexible. You have no excuse for not joining this program!

CASLIS Bulletin Special Issue

If you’re like me, you’re still slogging through your final assignments: don’t give up! You can do it!

But if you’re lucky enough to be finished your semester and need a break between job applications, allow me to suggest some reading material. The Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services (CASLIS) recently published a special issue of their bulletin that students should find interesting. The issue is freely available online, so go ahead and download it now. The first feature article is about student experiences with CASLIS and features a number of LIS students, including my classmate Sarah Severson (in fact, I participated in some of the CASLIS activities she helped organize in Ottawa last summer).

Scroll down to page 19, and you’ll find a piece summing up the year’s events at SIS, written by our very own Brittany Trafford. I need to remember to thank her for saying such flattering things about Web 2.You!

Current and prospective students should definitely check out this issue to get the inside scoop on how CASLIS is helping students, and to discover what’s going on at library schools across the country. As for me, I need to get back to my descriptive bibliography – but as of tomorrow afternoon, I plan to be entirely finished my MLIS!

Thoughts and advice from a fellow graduating student

I just came across a post that anyone interested in the MLIS program at the University of Western Ontario (or simply interested to hear another pespective on library school) should find interesting and helpful. A lot of it sounds similar to my experience at McGill, with a few obvious exceptions, such as the co-op program and life in the city of London, Ontario. Warren Layton blogs at Libre-arian:

Final Thoughts on Western’s MLIS Program

Guest post – Amanda discusses presentations by professionals

As my spring graduation approaches and I face the idea of no longer being a library school student (inspired or otherwise), I hope that the next generation of students will continue to blog about the issues that affect them. I’ll keep blogging, of course, but I think it’s important for students to hear authentic student voices, as well as professional ones. One way I’m promoting this is by encouraging other students to write guest posts for the ILSS. Today’s article is from Amanda Halfpenny, who’s in her first year of the MLIS program here at McGill.

A common complaint of students in MLIS programs is that our classes are often too theoretical and that we are not receiving enough practical information on what it will really be like once we are professional librarians in the real world. Students at McGill University decided to take matters into their own hands and since we got back from Winter Break there have been student-organized professional speakers on almost a weekly basis during lunch hours. These presentations have been organized by different student associations and the turnouts have been extremely impressive (in some cases higher than the number of students who actually attend their classes). It is not difficult to understand why: we are all curious to listen to librarians talk about their careers and we are hopeful that they will impart some words of wisdom that will help us as we prepare to begin our careers.

Last Thursday, the ABQLA (Quebec Library Association) student chapter hosted JoAnne Turnbull the general director of the Reseau Biblio of the Laurentians. She was an enthusiastic speaker and succeeded in engaging all the students with her witty accounts of the ups and downs of her career as a librarian in a variety of types of libraries (academic, corporate, law and public). In general, the students in our program are all concerned with whether or not they will find an interesting position after graduation. However, when JoAnne explained how bleak the job market was for librarians when she graduated in 1987 (1 position was posted for 60 graduating students), the students at her talk realized how fortunate we are that, despite the present economy, we have strong prospects of finding a library job soon after graduation. Another encouraging message that JoAnne shared was that if you are bored with your current job, it is fairly easy to create new challenges by either helping to develop new projects or simply by applying to a new position.

I strongly encourage MLIS students at other universities to stop waiting for your professors to organize professional speakers and to do it yourselves! You will not only learn a lot from the librarian who comes to give the talk but you will also gain valuable experience in organizing events (finding a speaker, advertising, etc.). For professional librarians, I would hope that you are all open to the prospect of speaking with groups of MLIS students. We are truly interested in what you have to say! So thank you JoAnne, and all the other guest speakers in the past month who have taken the time to come and meet with McGill’s MLIS students. We truly appreciate it!

How did I get here?

Steven Chabot over at Subject/Object has a Question for men (and women too!) in the library field: How did you get here? I’ve given a pretty brief explanation of this already, but I haven’t mused much on my choices as they apply to my gender.

The short answer that I love to give is that the decision to go to library school was inspired by seeing a t-shirt design online, with the phrase she blinded me with library science. And that’s true, but I hope no one believes I’m a shallow enough person to base my career entirely on a t-shirt slogan.

As a young boy, I wanted to become either a major league baseball player or a scientist, both of which are male-dominated professions. Of course, at that age, I didn’t fully appreciate the extent of either career; I believed that being a star baseball player mainly involved showing up to games and hitting home runs and that being a scientist mainly involved wearing a white coat and mixing chemicals. At any rate, I believe my interest in both of these fields waned before I discovered at school that I did not have the aptitude for either one.

In high school, I dreamed of becoming a computer programmer (another typically male career) after witnessing the popularization of the internet and watching movies like Hackers, but again, the activity turned out to be much more difficult than I’d imagined. To make matters worse, for some strange reason the university computer science programs I looked into also required chemistry, which I’d already dismissed.

I discovered psychology in my first year at UBC and fell head over heels for it – I loved studying the way people think, and I especially loved the fact that it followed the scientific method without being too, well, sciency. I opted for courses in social and developmental psychology (the least sciency ones), which meant that my classes were overwhelmingly female, as the men were taking cognitive and biopsych. Then again, even my honours class, which was made up of students from all areas of psych, was disproportionately filled with women. At any rate, I had no objection to being in a female-dominated field, and to be completely fair, although there were fewer male students, the ratio was much more even at the faculty level. My plan at that point was to one day become a psych professor myself.

After graduation, when I made the decision to choose library school over psych programs, I don’t think I was fully aware of the gender disparity in the LIS field. Of course I knew the stereotypes of the shushing librarian with her hair in a bun, but my high school librarian was a man, and I’d dealt with a number of male academic librarians at UBC. And then there’s the hero of Questionable Content (the webcomic that produces the aforementioned t-shirt), who is male and works in a library. In fact, one of the only librarians I actually talked to between applying to library school and starting the program was a gentleman I happened to meet while working at a restaurant in downtown Toronto. Even from that time, I’ve always been most interested in academic libraries, and I equate academic librarianship with academia in general, which was once a male-dominated domain but is now much more gender-neutral (at least in terms of the gender ratio of academics – I’m not trying to start a debate on whether male and female academics have equal opportunities!).

So when I finally started at SIS, I was quite surprised to find that my class was literally about 90% female. To be fair, men in my year are especially scarce – there are significantly more in next year’s graduating class. I haven’t found it to be much of an issue, though. I believe my gender has neither hindered nor helped me at SIS, except that professors are quick to learn my name because there are so few male names and faces to keep apart.

Steven wants to know how to encourage more men to take librarianship seriously, and here’s my advice:

• Show them that it’s challenging and intellectually stimulating, that it’s an academic pursuit that can lead to tenure
• Show them that it’s not about shushing and making sure no one tries to walk off with the reference books
• Show them that it involves technology and keeping up with the latest innovations
• Show them that it can take a variety of forms, each with its own strengths, including academic, public, school, and special librarianship

I’m certainly not saying that these points will only appeal to men – show them to women too! What I’m really suggesting is that we make people look beyond the stereotypes and see what the field is really about. Show them the breadth of opportunities available, and surely there will be something that they find appealing.

Read more >> Options >>

A librarian’s story

I’m always fascinated to hear the stories of how successful librarians got started in the field, so I wanted to share a post I found by Char Booth over at info-mational. Apparently this article was written in response to a library school student’s request, which makes it particularly relevant for me. Be sure to follow the link to the full post – Kickstart:

Straight out of library school most of us are identical on paper, so landing a first position is the luck of the draw that can take you literally anywhere. This is precisely how I found myself a year out of library school living in a cabin in rural Ohio, chasing wild turkeys into trees and throwing logs on the fire to stay warm….

I have definitely been accused of naivete when I talk about the potential of fostering change in libraries that seem too stilted and/or stolid to roll with the punches. I hear people say my time at OU was idyllic, that their workplaces are too large, too small, too oldschool, too conservative, too entrenched, too poorly funded to allow any sort of innovation or development. Similarly, whenever people wonder why I can be so blithe, I simply tell them that my first experience as a librarian made me this way. I saw the way academic libraries can work, and by work I mean work extremely well.

If you are a recent graduate in academic libraries chances are good you will have to take a job somewhere so depressingly unlike where you want to be that it breaks your heart. Take it from me, it might be the precise thing that teaches you who you are in the library sense as well as personally.

Welcome to library school

It’s the beginning of September, which means that a new cohort of students is starting library school. I’d like to welcome you all, especially the McGill first years who I plan to peer pressure into reading my blog. But seriously, the LIS field is an exciting place to be if you take advantage of the opportunities available outside of school. Here’s my advice for having an enjoyable and fruitful experience.

Start with blogs – you’ve already found mine, but if you go through my blogroll, and then the blogroll of each of those blogs, soon you’ll be able to keep up to date on all areas of the biblioblogosphere. Of course, following more than a few blogs will be unmanageable without a feed reader, so anyone not using one should start right away (and if you need helping setting a reader up, feel free to email me or leave me a comment on this post).

Don’t be afraid to approach the second year students when you need help, advice, or just someone to hang out with after class. When I started library school, I was too shy to spend much time talking to the second years, but by the end of the school year, I’d discovered that they were actually more than happy to help. Don’t let this happen to you – make friends with the old-timers early, when you’ll have the most questions and feel the most overwhelmed. Start by adding me as a friend on Facebook, and be sure to join the SIS Facebook group too. Another great way to meet second years is to join a student group – at McGill we have the McGill Library and Information Studies Students Association (MLISSA), and student chapters of the CLA and SLA, in addition to a number of smaller student groups.

You’re embarking on a journey full of possibilities. Enjoy!

McGill does Ottawa

On the weekend, I went to Ottawa with some classmates to visit a few libraries. What better way to feel inspired about librarianship than to actually visit some of the most beautiful and interesting libraries in the country? I’m lucky that Montreal is so close to Ottawa, but I’m sure anyone could find some interesting libraries within driving distance.

We started with the Library of Parliament, which is absolutely gorgeous, and one of the librarians gave us a full tour, including the less than glamourous but still interesting basement stacks.

After lunch, we visited the library at the National Gallery of Canada, which is less impressive architecturally but fascinating from an information perspective (especially for my classmate Rosanne, who has a special interest in art history). The librarian who showed us around even gave us a whole stack of meticulously designed pamphlets advertising past exhibitions.

Finally, we were shown around the Ottawa Public Library. More than one of the librarians expressed frustration with the lagging plans for a new facility, and indeed, the building was far from photogenic. We did, however, meet a number of librarians from different departments, each with a unque perspective on the roles of the library, and we left with our bags full of promotional materials for the library so we could learn more about the programs they offer.

This was a great opportunity, and I highly recommend organizing this kind of trip. Feel free to let me know about experiences you’ve had touring libraries, and for more photos, click the ones above to find my Flickr stream.

LIS basics

Most people, after completing their undergraduate degree, don’t even consider library school as an option. These people are missing out! Fellow student Andrew von Burkhardt shares some advice for people thinking about library school for the first time.