Like so many others before me, I too have now come full circle from aggressively reading this site’s entire archive while deciding whether to send out my library school applications […]
It’s that time of the semester, when students finishing their degree in the spring are frantically applying for jobs, and it’s all they seem to talk about. Or at least, […]
I saw myself through to the end of my seventh year, and with reluctance and eagerness I retired my uniform, my rank, and my identity. I had aspirations to learn […]
Many HLS readers and several of our regular writers, myself included, are preparing to graduate from library school and to head into the real world. As Megan wrote last week, […]
When I arrived at grad school, I was certain that I would not do research. I had chosen a course-based program for a reason – I wanted to learn from […]
It seems like I always say the same thing around this time of the year — how is it the end of the year already?! I still remember exactly what […]
Disclaimer: This post is a product of my experiences as an McGill SIS student. Please know that my opinions are not intended to be representative of the opinions of any […]
Have you ever had an “AH-HA” moment when you were doing your readings? That feeling is the best! It happens mostly when the text echos with my own situations and beliefs, or when the text enlightens you with insights you have never thought about before.
For my first post with HLS, I want to talk about everyone’s favorite topic: failure. A few HLS writers have written about this topic, but for me failure in library […]
A few times a week, I take a bus across campus to the university pool, where I swim for about thirty minutes before my job at Special Collections. Usually these […]
Since beginning graduate school, I’ve had difficulty knowing how to engage with professional associations. Being both a Mosaic Scholar and a Spectrum Scholar, I received a free annual membership to […]
In 2016, Christina did a round up of all of the resources brought on by the first LIS Mental Health Week. This year marks the third annual #LISMentalHealth week and […]
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, on the whole, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) tend to occupy a precarious position. Those of us who work for these […]
Group work is common experience for library school students, and a pretty popular topic of discussion here at HLS. I managed to avoid this experience during my first year as […]
While I hope this doesn’t happen, at some point during your time at school you might find yourself forced to navigate department or university bureaucracy in order to get something […]
It’s December! We did it! If you’re on the quarter system like me, then vacation has already started, and if you’re on semesters, then break is right around the corner. […]
Last week a good friend of mine and I were discussing our experiences in our respective MLIS programs. What struck me from this conversation was how little either of our […]
Today we welcome a guest post by Amanda M. Leftwich and Alena McNamara. Amanda and Alena are recent graduates from Clarion. Amanda’s areas of specialization include collection development, circulation, outreach, […]
As I have entered my second and final year of library school, I have been doing lots of reflecting. With one year of library school down, and with graduation and […]
Over the past two months at my job, I have been processing the papers of Judy Chicago, a white Jewish feminist artist who is currently based in New Mexico. Prior […]
If you’re thinking about applying for a graduate degree in library science, you know a thing or two about writing big checks. Maybe you’ve already been making payments on your […]
Following up on yesterday’s great post about handling anxiety in our current social climate, I wanted to talk a bit more on situating ourselves as information professionals in light of […]
Have you ever seen the stacks of an archives? In most cases, they are rows and rows of standard sized archival boxes. The only indication of the exciting content within […]
As I embarked on my journey to library school, I was in saw of this here blog. Given my love for writing, I had yearned to write for Hack Library […]
I have a friend who, throughout a busy grad school semester, juggled four classes, worked a 20-hour-per-week internship, ran a business, and still somehow managed to feed her dogs and […]
Like many of the Hack Library School writers and readers of our blog, I had the good fortune to attend the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference Chicago a week […]
In the summer of 2016, I quit my full-time, salaried job with benefits, packed up my belongings, and moved to Denver to begin my Master’s in Library and Information Science […]
Disclaimer: This post, co-written by Annie Tunnicliff and Chloe Waryan, is an update to Julia Skinner’s fantastic 2011 post about the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science (SLIS). […]
Two years ago, in the summer of 2015, my husband and I quit our jobs, packed our bags, and left our hometown for Iowa City, where I would be attending […]
The other day, I was looking through some old articles I had saved when I came across an article from last July 2016 in The Atlantic, “A Snapshot of a […]
While relaxing with a friend of mine at the end of the semester, she turned to me and asked a poignant question: “Why was this semester so mean?” I don’t […]
Before I start this post, I want to tell you all how much I have enjoyed writing for Hack Library School and sharing my perspective with its readers. Often, these […]
If I had to choose one phrase to describe my first year of library school, “information overload” would be a strong contender.
Us librarian types, we’re all about literacy, and we all acknowledge the power of the written word. Writing helped shape civilization as we know it; of course it’s powerful. Our […]
Library school isn’t my first graduate school experience, nor is it my first experience at the University of Illinois.
While studying History in undergrad, I was assailed all too frequently with “So, what are you going to do with that degree?” And now, when I tell folks that I […]
As the political climate, and our semesters/quarters, have waxed and waned, I am in solidarity with continuing to find ways to resist. However, if you’re anything like me, sometimes you […]
In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize […]
Decontextualization is becoming one of the most dangerous concepts we face. In libraries. In our personal lives. Everywhere. When I say decontextualization, I am talking about removing social factors from […]
A year ago I was finishing up my last days of being a speech therapist. A year ago I was leaving Chicago, my home of 10 years, only 25 miles […]
(Well ok, it’s actually going to be five more things but the Columbo picture wouldn’t have made sense if I’d given it that as a title). So here we are, […]
In the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the bubbles I create for myself – the bubble that made the recent election results so utterly unimaginable to […]
As I’m sure many of you know the last month or so of the semester is a real time crunch. (We do have some posts on managing it all here, here, […]
As we move through our individual degree programs, it is incredibly easy to get bogged down in the details of assignments, the job-hunt, and attempting to maximize our time in […]
“Oh, this smells. What if there’s mold? Am I going to get the black lung? And eew! Is that mouse poop?!”
Many of us have written about a typical day in the life of a MLIS student and in an earlier post I described how all my days went in my […]
This post was inspired by something that happened to me, but I hope to make it relevant and helpful to all of our amazing readers. (Thank you all for filling […]
I must confess, we weren’t entirely sure what would happen when we opened our ears to readers. Sometimes, blogging can feel a bit lackluster, a vain attempt to articulate some […]
It is required that students in the MLS program at Indiana University fulfill one internship. Since I am specializing in Art Librarianship, I am required to complete two internships. This […]
“I still do not know myself. Perhaps I never will.” — Sylvia Plath While indulging in dessert at Snow Meets Coffee, Kristina Williams, Hack Library School’s lovely and fabulous Managing […]
“Here,” my boss said, handing me a DVD, “you can watch this recording of me teaching. It will help.” I was a few months into a library technician job at […]
Over the last six months, I’ve taken two archives courses at institutions outside of my home school through the WISE consortium – Archival Appraisal, Arrangement, and Access and Encoded Archival […]
I guess that most people validate themselves professionally by the job opportunities they are offered. But pretty much anyone who’s ever applied for jobs has had to accept a fair […]
Image retrieved from Instagram When I saw this meme the other day, I experienced a little bit of #mindblown and a little bit of #yep. It reads “things are not […]
Hot town, summer in the univer-city! And you’re in the library. Helping researchers, preparing for the August onslaught of students, it’s way cooler than the outdoors (literally). But wait… what […]
Libraries have historically been places where people meet to share information, ideas and to develop knowledge and are at heart more about people than they are about books or computers. […]
With my second semester fast approaching, I thought this would be a good time to review my first semester of library school. I work full-time and was taking two classes […]
I feel lucky to have grown up in Miami, a primarily Hispanic city, where I am not very different from any other Hispanic American. However, as I have grown and […]
The thing about 2 years in graduate school is that there is an artificial ending built into the system, graduation. I graduated this May, passed the torch of Community Manager […]
Throughout my school career, I have always heard the terms “shy” and “reserved” used to describe me. I must admit, the description did not seem positive and would often affect […]
Let’s face it. Who doesn’t want a reason to justify their laziness and Game of Thrones binge watching? Well…hopefully not just me 🙂 But really, with classes, papers, projects, work, […]
I’ve no doubt that we have all been attracted to librarianship because of its glamorous, exciting image. However, there is another side to working in a library which may well […]
In the past few months, I’ve been hustling to land a summer internship, endlessly trawling the internet for opportunities, incessantly bugging professors and mentors for recommendations, and rewriting my resume […]
I am a Luddite, or at least on the Luddite spectrum. I drive a stick shift. I write in cursive. The only thing I dread more than a software update […]
Whether you are a new or a returning student at your program, you should join at least one student group or organization. Similar to Kathy Kosinski’s post in August 2015, […]
Here it comes again, the clichéd question: “Why bother with library school? We have the internet now.” I’ve been working in libraries for the better part of a decade so, […]
It’s almost graduation time for many students and job searching is in full swing. Although I’m new to the library science program, I have worked for many years managing teams and people. […]
Have you ever felt like your colleagues know more about your field than you do? Or like your successes can be attributed to luck rather than hard work and persistence? […]
Jessica Fletcher, the goddess herself, portrayed by Angela Lansbury, has kept me company during long IM chat shifts with no users, during marathons of library data analysis, while I was […]
As spring rolls around, I know that many of us are “cleaning” up our resumes/CVs and wordsmithing our cover letters. It’s time to find that job…whether it be a graduate […]
This semester I’m taking my last introductory course in UW-Madison’s program – a class called Organization of Information, or in other words, basic cataloging/metadata/resource description/organization all in one. The class […]
As I get started with my second semester, I thought it would be a good time to re-visit the subject of self-care and time management, particularly as a mature student. […]
There aren’t a ton of articles on this topic here at HLS, so today we’re going to talk about failure. More specifically, my failure. I’ve been serving on the display […]
Here at HLS we love reflection pieces; we have plenty written after symposiums, conferences, and after our time in library school. To build off the incredible post in honor of […]
Paul Lai, HLS alumnus, works as a manager of information resources for an online university’s writing center and as a librarian in a public library. He lives in the Twin Cities, […]
We’re a couple weeks out from LIS Mental Health Week (January 18-23) but in honor of the brave and supportive discussions that emerged online (see co-organizer Cecily Walker’s compendium of […]
Now that it’s February and prospective library school students will soon start receiving admission notices and making decisions about which library school to attend, I’m going to take a step […]
Jennifer Jarson is the Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her research interests include information literacy and student learning pedagogy […]
This is part of the ongoing ACRLog/HLS collaboration. Check out ACRLog for Madison Sullivan on “Librarianship Doesn’t Need Professionals” Read more about the project here! Heidi Johnson is the Social Sciences […]
This is part of the ongoing ACRLog/HLS collaboration. Check out ACRLog for Elizabeth Lieutenant’s post on “Practitioner Engagement in LIS Education” Read more about the project here! Callie Wiygul began […]
It is, of course, a good and necessary thing to have a break from study if you are able to over the holiday season. We’ve had some ideas on here […]
Editor’s note: Some of our amazing HLS writers have just finished their first semester of library school! They want to give you the full story on what they learned, what […]
Often in our line of work, people above us make choices without fully comprehending what will happen next. The impact often trickles down (and usually gains momentum) and we as librarians and […]
I know what you’re thinking. “Another article about defending your library career? Didn’t someone write one of those a couple of weeks ago?” The answer? Yes. Also, “I think someone wrote […]
Plagiarism is, by definition, an offense one person commits against another person. According to its Latin root, it is a kind of kidnapping. But can we kidnap from ourselves?
Those who are interested in this career path, have started on this career path, or are far into this career path already are familiar with some of the top responses to […]
Twitter brought me into librarianship. I’ve written about this before, and it still holds true today. I love the community of librarians that Twitter connects me with. But, an odd […]
Before I started my library degree, I often found myself wondering – why do I need a master’s degree to become a librarian? If the requirements and options were different, […]
It sometimes feel like the debate over the future of libraries and librarians will never go away. Recently, volunteer-run / community led libraries in the UK have become quite an […]
I remember sitting in the dining hall as an undergraduate, participating in conversations that would go something like this: “Man, I woke up at 7:45 for my 8 AM class. […]
I come from a family that doesn’t have work email, retirement stocks, or salaries. My parents and siblings, my “people,” are name tag and hairnet people. Clock-out for your lunch break people. With four older […]
When I started applying for library school last fall, one question nagged me: do I need to specialize in something while I’m getting my library degree? As I considered specializations […]
I am really excited to be finally starting my MLIS as it’s something I’ve wanted to do for several years, but at the same time I’m experiencing feelings of stress, […]
Greetings hackers! As I write my first post for Hack Library School, I am also beginning my first full semester at Catholic University’s MSLIS program. It’s been some time since […]
One of the most important things you can do for yourself while attending library school is become involved in at least one student organization, even if you really don’t want […]
Pagowsky, Nicole, and Miriam E. Rigby, eds. The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work. Association of College and Research Libraries, A division of the American Library Association, […]
Starting library school this semester? We’ve been there! Here’s our advice on everything from scheduling to technology to maintaining a social life.
What draws you to librarianship? What is it about this field that makes you excited, energized, purposeful? There’s something, right? Something that makes up the beating heart of your answer […]
Some of you may remember my decision to tackle my weaknesses head-on during the Spring 2015 semester. My database and cataloging skills were weak to non-existent, so I signed up […]
