This series on tribal collections highlights three projects from across the libraries, archives, and museums space that focus on Native American communities and culture, using best practices set forth by […]
I have three screens in front of me as I consider writing about The Best Interface Is No Interface by Golden Krishna, a book whose main thesis maintains that our […]
When you’re in the thick of the semester with a mound of reading and assignments ahead of you, you sometimes need a little inspiration. Amidst a polarized political climate, school […]
That’s right, it’s time to talk about the great debate of library school students (and all readers, for that matter). The topic that leads to the most personal of classroom […]
When I started library school, I knew I wanted to be a STEM librarian. For those who aren’t familiar, STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”. I have an […]
(Image from the Indigenous Digital Archive: “The Pratt’s Quarters Carlisle Indian School housed 100,000 children between 1879 and 1918″) This series on tribal collections highlights three projects from across the libraries, archives, and museums space […]
The other day I saw a meme that made me pause. It read “The Dark Ages began with the closing of a Library”. It took me a bit by surprise […]
Chances are there is at least one other person in the world that shares your exact same name. You might have used multiple names during your lifetime, and you may […]
This article presents a brief overview of the digital humanities and the reasons why future academic librarians ought to pay attention to it, and focuses on a somewhat neglected area of service–service to humanities graduate students
My semester is coming to its end, though my grad school career is not (I still have one more semester!). Still, this will be my last post on Hack Library […]
As a librarian-in-the-making, I have had some experience with setting up different educational websites and training aids—I run the site for my small educational business, for example, but until my […]
Have you ever needed to make a chart or graph for a presentation or project? Creating a simple visual tool may appear to be an easy task, but with seemingly […]
As I explored the work of data visualization experts and practitioners in an Introduction to Information Visualization class in the fall of 2017, the website and work of Alberto Cairo […]
Part of what initially attracted me to pursuing a Masters in Library & Information Science was the public, or community focused, aspect of the work. As an undergraduate student in […]
For those of you who know me, you know that I have a lot of librarian heroes, but my favorite librarian is my dad. While I was in high school, […]
Today we welcome a guest post by Autumn Wetli. Autumn is a graduate student pursuing her MLIS at Wayne State University with a focus on academic librarianship. She currently works […]
“Diversity. Entitlement. Evidence-Based. Fetus. Science-Based. Transgender. Vulnerable.” Over the weekend, reports have been rolling in about a list of words that the Trump administration wanted removed and banned from official […]
This fall semester I have been taking an elective course for my MLIS called Introduction to Information Visualization. In this course, we have explored data and information and the ways […]
A Reflection on the Design for Diversity Forum When a friend of mine invited me to the Design for Diversity (D4D) Forum at Northeastern University earlier this week, it was […]
“Once you’re halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.” – Janis Ian Last August, I quit my full-time nonprofit tech job and […]
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 […]
On April 13, Ivanka Trump sent out a tweet in honor of National Library Week. “…we honor our libraries and librarians for opening our eyes to the world of knowledge.” […]
One benefit to working at a library while being in library school is having the practical, on-the-ground experience to complement what is being taught in the classroom. However, when you […]
Getting involved as a student is an important part of the MLIS experience but it’s easier said than done (especially for those of us who are introverts!) Here are five short and simple ways to get involved on and off campus as an MLIS student:
Author’s Note: This post is Part 2 of the EAD Primer written by Carissa Hansen in December 2016. The author will also present a poster on the topic of EAD […]
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 […]
ASpace: The Archival Frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Ship UIowa. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new information management systems, to seek out new tricks and new […]
Mark your calendars! Hack Library School will host its very first Twitter chat on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 8pm CST.
Author’s Note: Over the last few months, I’ve heard from several archives students that they’ve had trouble gaining experience with Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in their classes. Luckily, EAD is […]
This semester, I am enrolled in a Digital Humanities seminar. I wanted to get a theoretical foundation for how evolving technology is shaping […]
Last September, Hack Library School outlined three initiatives to work on over the next year. Since then, we’ve made some changes according to these initiatives–some expected, some not. What has come out of those […]
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, […]
In studying for an MLIS in Digital Library and Information Services, one of the subjects we’ve covered in detail is digital reading. This has been from the viewpoints of the […]
Co-authored by HLS Contributing Writers, Carissa Hansen and Kendra Werst. This post is meant to serve as a primer for beginners interested in digital collections work. There are three sections: […]
Before starting an MLIS in digital librarianship I have worked in libraries for around nine years. Despite being involved and enthusiastic, a lot on the course is new to me. […]
Zine librarianship presents an interesting intersection of archival practices and librarianship, while also posing a number of challenges for fitting zines into the practices and standards developed around printed books.
This semester I enrolled in LIS452, “Foundations of Information Processing.” I am learning Python. I’m learning how to code!
When I started working in interlibrary loan two years ago, my experience with the system was limited to getting one book on vintage hairstyles through my public library and frantically […]
It’s that time of the year again. For those of us that took a summer off from our LIS studies to have, well, a summer away from school, welcome back! […]
Until this summer, I never struggled with feeling disconnected as a student or a professional. I chose an in-person LIS program for precisely this reason, and my public library job […]
During graduate school, lots of things changed in my life. I gained new perspectives, read challenging articles and theories, traveled to Italy to present research I worked on, faced the […]
Having experienced numerous career changes in my lifetime and mid-life exposure to higher education, I am in my third semester in Library School at the age of 47. Each semester, […]
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to address the broad and messy task of incorporating technology education into my LIS program. It all started with my resolution to add a […]
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 […]
That technology influences information and behavior through built-in and often invisible assumptions is neither a new phenomenon nor new to dialogue among librarians. (Although we could always stand to talk about it more than we already do.) In this post, I highlight some recent contributions on algorithms and libraries in hopes of keeping it in the forefront. If we didn’t already, librarians have to care about algorithms now.
Nancy Lovas is pursuing her MLS at the University of Maryland, where she works in the University Libraries as a Research & Teaching Fellow and as a graduate assistant in […]
The standoff between the US District Court of California and Tim Cook of Apple Inc. should concern everyone who works in our industry.
About a year ago, I started thinking about building a professional website. It seemed like the “next” step in my professional life. If a built a website in my first […]
Happy birthday – 15 January 2016 marked fifteen years of Wikipedia. To mark it they asked “each librarian on earth” to take part in #1Lib1Ref – adding a citation to […]
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 […]
As I’m sure our readers know…I’m a rare book person…oh you didn’t know that? You mean me talking about it constantly didn’t give it away? Starting last summer, though, my […]
Digital preservation has found its way into the mainstream of modern librarianship. Odd and awkward as it may feel to us in these early days, saving Twitter is a critically important project that can help us redefine what it means to be a librarian and reclaim some of our lost cultural significance.
I have to admit that I didn’t “get” “twitter” “before” I was in library school. I may not “get” it. I had an account before I applied and it has […]
All Hail Cloud Storage Summer’s an excellent time to reenergize, as well as a fine period for preparing for upcoming classwork or for reevaluating old methods & making new tactics. […]
You’re a savvy library student. You read HLS, you may be active on Twitter, you’re learning to network with other library students and librarians—you’re doing it all right. There are […]
This past semester my institution decided to spread the news that beginning in the fall semester it would institute a mandatory (for enrolled students) laptop requirement for our program. My […]
This is a new series offering alternatives to Microsoft’s Powerpoint by highlighting various presentation software. As we tend do in library school and librarianship, I’ve given a few presentations lately. […]
So you know that you want to be a librarian, but have you thought about specializing in a certain field? Maybe you have an interest in emerging technologies or you want […]
This is a new series offering alternatives to Microsoft’s Powerpoint by highlighting various presentation software. As librarians, it is our responsibility to learn about new technologies and software that could […]
Many library positions will involve some element of instruction or demonstrating tools or resources. It’s likely that most will, when you think beyond formal instruction sessions and start to consider […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Erica Hayes, Siobhain Rivera, Ariadne Rehbein, MLS Candidates at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. We started with the best of intentions. […]
Editor’s Note: Celia Emmelhainz worked as an international librarian for three years while studying for her MLS, and now works as a Social Science Data Librarian in Maine. She blogs […]
One of my new year/new semester resolutions is to really get my digital housekeeping in line. Over break I read a Washington Post piece shared by Brianna, a wonderful HLS alum, […]
Perhaps it’s related to being perennially both inquisitive & distractible, but I’ve always enjoyed taking notes and almost always have paper with me. Here’s a few of my old pocket […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Katherine Hickey, MS and Kyungwon Koh, PhD. Innovative learning spaces called Makerspaces and Learning Labs have become a ubiquitous presence in the world […]
No matter how exhausted I am, every other Tuesday night I do something that helps reinforce and nuance what I’m learning in library school: I spend an hour or so […]
The internet is pretty awesome guys. Privacy attacks and trolls aside, no other tool humans have ever created can match its potential for information transfer. Sure, I often use it […]
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 […]
As the leaves turn a subtle amber and the wind begins to usher us along our hectic school schedule, no sooner is the fall semester underway in library school land. With it, […]
A few months ago at work, at approximately 10:30 a.m., the Internet went down and service was not restored until about 4 o’clock that afternoon. Considering that I work at a public library where many of the patrons are there specifically for using the Internet and that the Internet is […]
With another fall semester looming, I wanted to take some time to advocate for a few easy-access, low-cost ways to do some self-directed learning. As exciting as our LIS classes, practicums, and internships can be it is easy to forget that our grad student status grants us access to a variety […]
Sometimes, the stars of open access (OA) and student publishing align. Alignment generates academic journals of student works that are made freely accessible to all. Many institutions already support student journals, as this vast survey of the undergraduate publishing landscape shows. How can LIS students contribute our unique skills and perspectives to student publishing? And how would everyone involved benefit from such involvement? Adding Value In […]
On Friday, I had the opportunity to join the Virginia chapter of the Special Libraries Association on a tour of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation. It was a spectacular experience – now I know what 50 petabytes of data storage capacity look like, what a U-matic reformatting robot looks […]
Way back in 2011, this blog featured a pair of posts about personal branding, the idea of designing and manging your professional, digital self. In Online Presence, a.k.a. You 2.0, Annie reminded us of the importance of being ‘Googleable’ and of our abilities to control the information that employers can […]
Are you ready to become a tweetbrarian? Twitter is a fantastic tool for engaging with other librarians, monitoring LIS trends and debates in real time, and gathering unfiltered insights and inspiration from peers and seasoned professionals. The challenge for new tweeters is to know where to start among the 5,000 librarylanders on Twitter! So […]
Last semester, members of my ALA Student Chapter joined a public tour of the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s an extraordinary facility with a growing list of accolades, including the 2014 Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries. I was […]
Just a few days ago, I finished up a semester-long virtual internship with Digital Learn, a PLA initiative grant-funded by IMLS designed to”create an online hub for digital literacy support and training.” Over the last four months, I learned a lot about this fabulous organization, and I also learned a […]
Are you a Wikibrarian? I recently became one—a librarian who edits Wikipedia (“the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”)—and I have found the experience rewarding in the extreme. I have even stumbled into a role as an embedded consultant, helping faculty teach undergrads how to write Wikipedia articles on gender history, on which improvements are […]
I’m not going to say that my graduate student budget forced me into the world of open source software, but it certainly didn’t hurt. There was a time when “open source” was synonymous with “free of charge”, but with the proliferation of mobile technologies and free apps, the lines between […]
If you work in teen services you are probably already elbow deep in programming, but for the rest here is a reminder: it is almost Teen Tech Week! Next week, March 9-15, libraries across the country will be celebrating YALSA’s “DIY @ your library” theme by providing programs on coding, […]
Hello, hackers! Do you have a digital PLN? If not, this post will explain the concept and share some tips for success. I discovered the concept of the digital PLN (a web-based personal or professional learning network) through an information literacy instruction class I took in Fall 2013. One of […]
By Brianna Marshall and Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet HASTAC, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, was founded in 2002 to serve as a community of “humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning for the 21st century.” It’s an incredible online portal […]
Image courtesy of the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte Open access refers to free and unrestricted online access to publishing, especially scholarly research. Examples range from articles, theses, and dissertations to conference presentations. In some cases, open access work is free of copyright or licensing restrictions, meaning researchers […]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Dana Bublitz. So, you’re interested in digital humanities as a library science student, but your LIS program (and maybe your whole university) doesn’t even have the slightest idea what you mean when you talk about “DH”–or maybe they just give you a […]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Grace Thomas. “I am an English major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), with a minor in Computer Science.” After the initial eye-widening or eyebrow-knitting of the questioner, I am asked, “So…what do you, umm, hope to do with that…?” Depending on […]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ashley Maynor. 1. There is no universally-accepted definition for Digital Humanities and probably never will be. Instead, Digital Humanities (DH) is and will continue to be defined by the kinds of collaboration and innovation that occurs at the intersection of liberal arts […]
We’re excited to share that next week Hack Library School will feature an entire week of digital humanities-related content – we’re dubbing it “DH week.” Here’s what you have to look forward to: 1/20 – An introduction to DH for library-dwellers, Ashley Maynor 1/21 – From an undergrad digital humanist, […]
When people discuss the digital divide, they are usually talking about how race and class differences contribute to one’s ability to access and use computers and the Internet. But in my opinion, there is another digital divide among professionals, one that separates those who make their living creating technologies and […]
I hope each one of you have had a happy holiday season, and warm wishes for a happy and healthy New Year! Perhaps it’s the end of the year, or the end of the semester, but I’ve been reflecting quite a bit lately on my work over the past few […]
As programmer and tech journalist Ciara Byrne noted in her op-ed “No–You Don’t Need to Learn To Code”, learning to code is not always fun, easy, or even useful for every career path. Nonetheless, programming can develop several soft skills that translate across a broad range of professions. In addition […]
Readers, we have exciting news! Hack Library School will be featuring a digital humanities-themed week of posts in early January 2014. We are soliciting content from readers who have ideas they’d like to share. We’re looking for posts on the following themes: A basic introduction to DH Alt-ac careers for […]
Although I’ve been working on an MLS for a little over two years, I’m still trying to improve my study space. While I plan to work IN a library when I graduate, my default study space is at home. One thing I’ve learned in talking to my library school classmates […]
My first interaction with a computer was in my second grade public school classroom. Each day we had a set rotation where students either spent the afternoon reading a book, writing in a journal, or playing in the “computer lab.” The latter rotation section was a favorite because a handful […]
It is Monday morning, and I’m polishing this piece from a coffeeshop, about 900 miles from my university after working on it periodically from 3 cities on 2 continents. The file is being automatically updated to the cloud ever time I save, just in case my battery or computer dies […]
In library and information science schools we are coming to terms with, well, terms. Lexicons, vocabularies, common jargon sets and search terms are the tools of our trade. So I ask: Have you noticed though how many verbs have been web-born? Or, in the spirit of web 2.0, social web-re-born? […]
Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a guest post by Bryan J. Brown. You can read part 1, The Basics, here. After learning HTML and CSS, the next steps on your path to web development greatness depend largely on what you want to do. Depending on your personal and/or […]
Editor’s note: This is part 1 of a guest post by Bryan J. Brown. Part 2 will be posted on July 30. If you’ve been paying attention to the librarian blog scene at all, you’re probably familiar with the infamous “Should librarians learn to code?” debate. Maybe “debate” isn’t the […]
Do you have an eResume yet? I think it goes without saying that every day we become more and more digitally driven. Personally, even though I know it is still done, I cannot imagine sending a hard copy of my resume or examples of my work anywhere. I have my […]
Ruth Tillman doesn’t like to be bored. In addition to being a full time library paraprofessional and part time library student, she has embarked on a number of projects that many of us might see as full-time jobs unto themselves. I wanted to talk to her about one of her […]
