The More Things Change
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849 I began my comprehensive exam with this quotation. Forgive me as I plagiarize myself, but it seemed fitting, as […]
Author Archives
Becky Katz
Student-led innovation: Parts 3 and 4
(See parts one and two.) As a reminder, this mini-series (nowhere near as any by Ken Burns!) arose out of conversations suggesting that if social justice were to be incorporated in […]
Student-led innovation: Part 2
Last month, I wrote about introducing social justice into the LIS curriculum, and offered specific ideas for incorporating social justice in a required “Organization of Information” class. Today I’ll offer […]
Student-led innovation: Bringing social justice to LIS education
Introduction. The idea I’m going to propose at the end of this introduction came to me during the ALISE Academy at the ALISE (Association for Library and Information Science Education) conference in […]
Graduation Requirements
I just registered for my last semester of library school–advanced legal research and comps. The first time I mentioned comps to my previous therapist, she said “oh, I know someone […]
On Multiculturalism in Reference Services
Note: I originally posted this on my personal blog. I thought it would be useful to share here. We talk a lot about multiculturalism in library school, but to a […]
Hack your tablet: Notetaking apps
When my boss told me that one of our vendors was giving each of us in the office an iPad (let’s just breeze over the issues this introduces into the […]
Making the most of asynchronous classes
I was in college back in the stone age, when landlines were ubiquitous, ethernet was a luxury, and professors wrote on chalkboards. (Not even whiteboards!) So the asynchronous, discussion-board-based class I’ve been introduced to in library school has been a culture shift for me. Only some of my classes have […]
Information Literacy
One of my first library school classes was entitled “Information Literacy and Instructional Design.” We spent a grand total of less than one class session* discussing what information literacy is, based on the ALA’s information literacy competency standards for higher education (more on this later). We spent no time on how […]
Reflections on My First AALL Conference
As I write this, I am sitting in the San Antonio airport very ready to go home after my first AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) conference. I have a stack of business cards of folks to follow up with; librarians who have experience in issues I’m passionate about and […]
Vendor Relationships
It’s conference season (didn’t I just say something like that in last week’s round-up? I must be excited) and with that, exhibit hall season! Other people have shared advice on how to tackle the exhibit hall: restrain yourself from taking all the swag, plan ahead, don’t go hungry. Okay, this […]
Rigor
Two weeks ago, the Library Loon posted about rigor and diversity in library school. As one might hope from a topic such as that, libraryland twitter erupted in discussion. The Loon’s basic premise–highly simplified here simply because all of you can go read the whole post if so inclined (and I hope you […]
Pro Bono Librarianing
I’m an attorney, and one of the things that attorneys are encouraged (in some states,required) to do is pro bono work. “Pro bono” means “for good” and is generally representation of a low-income person or a non-profit organization without payment. Libraries are generally a community function and librarians generally serve […]
Hacking Your Career Plans: Independent Information Professionals
This post came about as a result of combining in my mind the following four things: A conversation about possible directions of big legal research sites (Lexis and Westlaw, specifically but hypothetically)*, now that there are so many reliable alternatives for finding primary law (statutes, court opinions) at significantly lower […]
When Library School Hands You Lemons
My library school experience has, I’m sad to say, handed me a bunch of lemons. There are the professors who aren’t as inspiring as I would prefer (sorry), the journal articles that look like they weren’t proofread, the classes that are scheduled at times that are inconvenient for everyone. Including […]
