Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kelly Minta. The concept of librarians creating content and using grassroots promotional techniques to present libraries to the public isn’t a new idea, but it is happening in more innovative ways today. The creation of content, whether on interactive user-generated sites or […]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Cassandra Elton. I was in kindergarten when I got my first library card. The two requirements for a child’s library card at our public library in Summit, New Jersey were you had to have a parent cosign the card with you and […]
This is the inaugural post in a new series called “So What Do You Do?” in which we will talk about our experiences in internships. We wanted to showcase the wide range of things people are doing in the world of library and information science. Tell us a bit about […]
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two part series. An interview with Lauren Pressley, author of So You Want to Be a Librarian, was posted last week on Thursday, November 29. Librarian and author Lauren Pressley is working with crowdfunding startup unglue.it to provide free access to her book […]
“Can I still write for Hack Library School if I am not technically pursuing a degree in LIS anymore?” I recently posed this question to our crack team of HLS editors. I am not quitting pursuing a Masters… just not an MLIS. An addition in degree offerings in the College of Communication and Information Studies at FSU allowed […]
Last fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement captured the attention of people across the nation, and amongst librarians, one particular image made the rounds, inciting chuckles as well as knowing nods. (See also two HLS posts from last fall: HackLibSchool on Occupy Wall St: How Do Libraries Fit In? and […]
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two part series. An interview with Andromeda Yelton of Gluejar will be posted next week on Thursday, December 6. We drew you in, didn’t we? Well, it’s true: librarian and author Lauren Pressley is working with crowdfunding startup unglue.it to provide free access […]
I’m going to tell you a secret – not a super-secret secret since I’m writing about it in a public forum, but a semi-secret all the same: I very often don’t know what I’m doing. I get tugged in all kinds of different directions by various and disparate interests and […]
Crowdfunding is when individuals come together as a crowd to fund projects by other individuals and organizations. Often funders get perks or rewards for their contribution, ranging from small benefits like a thank you post card or a tote bag to original artwork or a private concert. The two most popular crowdfunding […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by David Winger. When I looked at the New York Times website a few weeks ago and saw that Twitter had agreed to a formal request from the German government to block access by users in Germany to the Twitter account of a […]
The leaves are falling, the weather is cooling (at least for those of us in temperate climates), and November is whipping by. I can hardly believe how quickly this semester has gone, but I am very excited to head home for the fast-approaching holidays. Like me, you may be looking […]
Your task is to develop a persona, and make up a research question that persona might ask. It can be anything you want. Once you have a question, take it to a reference desk at a library/archive/historical society of your choosing. Then write a paper about the experience. Sound familiar? […]
It’s a simple fact: each year library and information science becomes a more technical field; there is an increasing expectation that by the time you leave library school you will have some amount of technical skill (coding, web design, database creation, etc.). As many schools adopt more and more technical […]
I’d like to start my tenure here at Hack Library School with a dose of brutal honesty: I’m not a huge fan of people. Ok, to be fair, it’s not that I don’t LIKE people. It’s just that, as an introvert, I find them exhausting, and the prospect of seemingly […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Alex Harrington. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” may be a bit melodramatic, but “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness” fits pretty neatly when I try to describe my graduation […]
Like a lot of people, I’ve been devastated to see the impact of Hurricane Sandy and wanted to find ways to help. I’ve donated to a few aid organizations, but once reports started coming in about damaged libraries, I thought that it was an opportunity for folks in LIS to […]
Even though it’s still just midway through the fall semester, I’m already looking ahead to the transition from student-hood to professional life next summer. I know that my internship experience is one of the most fantastic things I’ve done so far to open the door into the working world, and […]
Happy Halloween from Hack Library School! Here’s a quick run down of resources to celebrate Halloween librarian-style. Halloween themed books for children and young adults- All Hallow’s Read: A Parents’ Guide to Scary Books for Young Readers Popular Halloween Books Best Halloween Books for Kids: Scary, Spooky, and Silly Or […]
Earlier this week, Joanna wrote about her experience at a small library in Florence, Italy. Last week, my wife and I travelled to Scotland. Our home base was Glasgow, but we made day trips to other places, such as the Isle of Skye, Oban, Inverness, and Edinburgh. Scotland is a […]
I recently started a new job. For the last year I’d been happily working at the circulation desk of a medical/academic library, and I was happy there. It was a comfortable spot: nice supervisors, nice work environment, and a job I knew inside out. But I’m aiming to work in […]
I am a librarian who serves a population of 24. Perhaps the count is 32 if one includes faculty and staff of Florida State University International Programs Study Center in Florence, Italy. The library, as the previous Student Supervising Librarian noted last year, is almost as antiquated as the 15th […]
We are delighted to announce that Hack Library School has welcomed nine new contributing writers. We were all very impressed with the range of interests and experiences that they will bring to the blog. Without further ado, here they are!
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Katie Clausen. In one of my courses we are analyzing ALA’s “Core Values of Librarianship.” We take on one core value every week, reading articles and discussing how these values define us as librarians. It is important to understand the policy that […]
How often do you use Wikipedia? If you’re anything like me, probably a lot! I’ve been interested in exploring the relationship between libraries and what I’m pretty sure it’s the only encyclopedia I’ve ever used for a long time (giant physical copies were already on their way out by the […]
During my last semester of library school, I always tried to keep the finish line in mind and my motivation going. I told myself that once I finished, I’d have all the free time in the world to finally watch Doctor Who and finally learn to cross-stitch. Turns out I […]
There seem to be a lot of crossroads, lately. I’m in my second year of graduate school, with commencement hurtling towards myself and my classmates here and at other schools. The questions of self-definition that I avoided last year have come back, not so much haunting as classifying. I still […]
A major focus of one of my School Media Studies classes this semester has been how the implementation of the Common Core State Standards will affect the role of the school librarian. As one of my classmates aptly pointed out, the Common Core State Standards are a way for school […]
A few days ago, I stopped by the class of the freshly-minted new cohort of my program to say hello to them on behalf of a professional organization I work with, and to invite them to join and/or attend an upcoming event. It took all of ten minutes, no big […]
My MLIS program has a strong commitment to encouraging students to use various online and computer-based presentation/communication tools in class projects. We use a number of different programs in addition to the course management system on campus (Desire2Learn, which is like Blackboard and Moodle). This immersion in the wide range […]
Ask a librarian to describe the stereotype of librarians, and you’ll undoubtedly hear something like, “Wears thin wireframe glasses, hair-in-a-bun, drab sweater-vest or cardigan, long wool skirt, owns a cat, doesn’t like loud noise…” and the list goes on. I’ve even heard some librarians describe the stereotype as “Full Cat-bag.” […]
On September 10th and 11th, I attended the HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp held in Bloomington, Indiana. The UnCamp was a joint venture organized by Indiana University, my institution, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All in all, the UnCamp spanned a day and a half of demonstrations and hands-on examples […]
Even though I am a library student, or maybe because I am a library student, I rarely give the existence of public libraries much thought. I’ve worked in two libraries since I started library school, so I spend a lot of time in them. Most of the time I just […]
Kelly Rowland Picture thanks to wikipedia Motivation is something I have been thinking a lot about recently, and not just because two of my friends have become unreasonably obsessed with the Kelly Rowland song by the same name, despite the fact that the song was released at least a […]
Greetings readers! Here at Hack Library School, we pride ourselves on providing engaging, thoughtful, and useful resources for Library and Information Science students. The best part of this experience, in my opinion, is the community the writers have with each other and our readers. Unfortunately, because we’re a blog by […]
Are you attending the Joint Conference of Librarians of Color this week? Or do you just live in the Kansas City, MO area? Join us for a casual meet-up Thursday, September 20. We’ll meet at 8pm in the lobby of the Westin Crown Center and walk together to a TBD […]
Being more than a month into my second year at Pratt SILS, I’m trying not to drown in the load of reading that comes with the classes. A majority of my readings are from scholarly journals, and I’d like to give a run down of some of the journals that […]
Recently, library-land has been buzzing about the soft launch of EveryLibrary, a non-partisan , national organization dedicated to helping libraries at the ballot box. As we move towards election time, I’m sure we’re all reading about what measures and initiatives we’ll be voting for and against (because we’re all responsible […]
I’m starting the first semester of my second year of my LIS masters degree at the University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences. So far this semester, I’ve felt pretty overwhelmed because I’m taking very tech heavy classes with loads of new terminology. Last week, one of the other Hack […]
Thoughts On Being A Younger Library School Student Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Julia Feerrar Just three months ago I walked across a stage in south-central Pennsylvania to receive my undergraduate degree. I thought of the hard work completed, the friendships forged, and I wished fervently that […]
Because the master’s degree puts “professional librarians” in a different classification than paraprofessional librarians, those of us in library school may not give much thought to unions or to how unions might shape the workplaces we hope to enter. Not all libraries are unionized, but a number of public libraries […]
As library science students begin classes again, school is also beginning for the children we serve as School Media Specialists and Children’s Librarians. In that spirit, Ashley and I co-wrote a starter kit for anyone interested in librarianship related to children. I am currently pursing my School Media Studies degree, […]
As a second-year SLIS student, I’ve talked to quite a few new students in my program who are anxious about securing library jobs. I can understand how they feel; after all, one year ago I was a freshly minted SLIS student. I had never gotten paid to work in a […]
Photo Credit: PostGrad.com During my first few weeks of library school I noticed that my cohort was a mix of people in their early twenties fresh out of their undergraduate degrees, and older people who were coming to librarianship as a second career. I count myself among the second group; […]
When I was starting library school, nobody warned me about the sheer number of questions I would receive, from family, friends, and random strangers. Most of them are variations on a single theme: You need a masters for that? While I’m still getting these questions, now that I’m more than […]
Another school year is upon us! Over the next few weeks, we will add some more tips and discussions to our Starter Kit Series as we welcome new library students to the blog. We’d like to encourage returning students to revisit the series along with us as well and especially […]
Earlier this year, I wrote a post called You Are Now an Information Science Professional: First Year Reflections. I spoke of lessons gleaned from having a year of library graduate school under my belt. The best lesson came from my advisor after expressing frustration to her about not feeling qualified […]
Librarians are, as a profession, exceedingly generous toward their newest members. I expect most of us have had at least a few great interactions with professional librarians who have given us their time and attention for interviews, given us professional advice, written us references and recommendations, and generally been on […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Sarah McClung. When most people hear the term “study abroad,” they think of a semester or even a year overseas their junior year of college. Outside of spending your whole masters program at an international university, most people don’t think of study […]
In my introduction to library and information science class last fall, we came across mention of the San Francisco Public Library’s social services provisions and discussed the public service nature of librarianship as well as the question of whether library science students should have some training in social work. The […]
If you are in the DC area, we’re having an informal Hack Library School meetup tomorrow evening. Below are the details: Tuesday, August 7, 2012 starting around 5:30pm Aria Pizzeria & Bar 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW The Federal Triangle metro stop (orange/blue lines) is closest, but Metro Center (red/orange/blue lines) […]
A few months ago a co-worker introduced me to Pinterest with the disclaimer that I would waste massive amounts of time on the platform once engaged. And they were right. I’ve spent a great deal of time collecting recipes I’ll never cook, outfits I’ll never buy and ideas to repurpose […]
Well! ALA Annual has come and gone, and with it, so has HackLibSchool’s Conversation Starter, and our 2012 Hack ALA series! I think I can speak for all of us who attended in saying that the conference was teeming with information, networking, drama, and pure fun! Our conversation starter was […]
Editor’s Note: This is a Guest Post by Anita R. Dryden This past year I had the pleasure of participating in the American Library Association’s Emerging Leaders program, which is designed to help new librarians get involved in ALA. Throughout the course of the program you attend leadership training, meet […]
In This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, Marilyn Johnson says that she first became interested in writing about librarians while researching a book about obituaries. She noticed that librarians always had the most interesting obituaries she read, ranging from a librarian who sailed the […]
In this installment of Hack Library’s School’s Emerging Career Series, Caro Pinto explores the role of librarian as project manager. Caro Pinto is the Social Science & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Hampshire College where she oversees collection development, outreach, and instruction for the School of Critical Social Inquiry, works on […]
I recently read Deepak Malhotra’s I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze (2011), which I found as an ebook via my local public library. I would describe it in brief as Who Moved My Cheese? meets The Matrix. Some of you […]
Image Credit: http://zapatopi.net/labs/ Last year, HLS’s founder Micah wrote a post about the “publish or perish” paradigm. He shares (or shared then, not sure if he still does) with me some apprehensions about the publishing model, in general, and how it relates to the library science world, in particular. I entered […]
My cohort, we talk. After our weekend intensive classes, we often go out roaming in search of a likely bar, and when we find one, we sit, we drink, and we talk. And since we’ve generally just spent 12 hours in class together, we usually end up talking about library […]
Editor Note: This is a guest post by Jarrett Drake. “The Incunabula. I’d like to see them,” said a patron in a muffled tone. “Can you repeat that?” I responded unassumingly. “The Incunabula, the Incunabula!” she exclaimed, her voice rising with each repetition. After a brief hesitation of speech that […]
Earlier this summer I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, British Columbia. While I was there I took an intensive course on GIS and the Humanities. I was a complete novice but I enjoyed the chance to begin developing a brand-new skill set. This course was fresh […]
The Emerging Careers series at HLS will focus mainly, and not surprisingly, on career paths opening up in the digital realm of the library and information science field. It’s true that our field continues to “emerge” most visibly there, while the death of print, and even of libraries themselves, continues […]
We are slowly getting reacclimatized to real life after an absolutely fantastic and overwhelming time at ALA Annual over the weekend. We learned, we networked, we were inspired, we picked up tons of great freebies in the exhibit hall, we partied hard and we generally geeked out on all things […]
If you’re new to reading Hack Library School, aren’t able to read all our posts, or just refreshing your memory — here’s a short list of some posts from this past semester. And don’t forget to check out the Best Of from previous semesters too. Our Top 10 Posts (by […]
Joanna recently wrote on why you should attend conferences, Brianna wrote about presenting at them, and PC Sweeney wrote about how to be awesome at going to conferences, but what happens when you get there and you are starving for food you can actually eat? Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, Paleo/Primal […]
Today we’ve got a special guest post from JP Porcaro with lots of advice and fun events to check out this year at ALA. He’s a 2012 Mover and Shaker, head guy at 8-bit library, and tweets at @8bitlibrary. Hey hacklibschool team, JP here (you know, #partyhard #makeithappen guy). If […]
Editor’s Note: This follows in a series of posts in our annual Hack ALA Week dedicated to all things conference-y and professional. As students, it’s important to get your feet wet in the LIS professional world early, and as often as your budget allows. While these posts are ALA Annual-themed, much […]
Editor’s Note: We are happy to kick off our second annual Hack ALA week! We’ll be dedicating posts this week to all things conference-y and professional. As students, it’s important to get your feet wet in the LIS professional world early, and as often as your budget allows. While these […]
Librarianship is a quickly changing field. Thanks to computers and the internet, it has undergone a tremendous metamorphosis over the last two decades. In light of these changes, we’re kicking off a new series in which we talk about the many emerging careers in librarianship. Today’s inaugural issue talks about […]
I am pleased to say that HackLibSchool will be holding two events at this years ALA Annual conference. Awhile back, I wrote about trying to bring HLS and the issues we care about to the conference level. Well, I’m happy to say that our Conversation Starter was accepted! To be […]
The goal of Hack Library School is to provide the information and resources to get the most of your MLIS and LIS education (though a great deal of our content is accessible and useable to those in any discipline). I find that sometimes we all need the reminder of the […]
Like many here on Hack Library School, I’ve been super busy with finals and the stress of graduating (see my two previous posts from earlier this year). Now that I’ve passed through the crucible of my last term, I’ve found myself in another tricky spot: the job hunt. I’m fortunate […]
I had hoped to be able to write up a brief review of a professional development library webinar this semester, but my two attempts to join in on live webinars via ALA and OCLC proved unsuccessful due to technical difficulties on my end. For one webinar, the audio connection was full of static […]
Back in March 2011, Micah wrote a post on the need for LIS students to foster a culture of writing and sharing. I followed his advice (as it has yet to lead me astray!), and this past semester I started as a Content Editor of San Jose State University’s SLIS Student […]
Since the end of spring semester, Hack Library School bloggers have been posting great content to keep you going this summer. For me, summer will not be a break. I’ll be finishing my last semester of school. If you’re like me, library school has been a marathon. Perhaps you’ve just […]
There have been some terrific posts about conferences on HackLibSchool in the past: Chris recently wrote about unconferences and Joanna wrote a post earlier this year encouraging students to attend conferences as a library student. Today I want to take these posts a step further and encourage other future librarians and […]
Make your own card catalogues at blyberg.net Well, it’s that time of year again…classes have wound down, we have (mostly) caught up on sleep after the bleary, stress-filled days of final exams and projects. And now, as we step blinking into the sunlight for the first time in months, our […]
Congratulations to everyone who’s just finished the first year of an LIS degree! If you’re anything like me, you’re still occasionally having phantom-homework guilt, as it’s such a novel feeling to have a bit of spare time. That spare time can be put to good use, though! In the spirit […]
There are a variety of “unconferences” devoted to certain aspects of the library and information science field. Examples are BarCamp (for open web technologies), THATcamp (for humanities and technology), InfoCamp (for general information enthusiasts), and CURATEcamp (for digital curation). Zack wrote about unconferences in his post InfoCamp and the Unconference. […]
Who is ready for summer? Several of us are finishing up our schoolwork, dealing with stress, and ready for a quick breather. Here are a few summer reading recommendations from your dear HackLibSchool editors. We’ve broken the list down into Leisure and LIS reading. Please add your own recommendations in […]
Job hunting is a tricky beast to master. The process is emotionally draining at times, there are so many things to be excited/anxious about. For some of us who have just finished our last semester of school, this is the prime time to start looking. Most people advise that you […]
Do you feel that buzz in the air? Or maybe you can actually feel the vibrations under your skin and drumming in your ears. You might even be thinking “I don’t have time to read Hack Library School right now!” It isn’t just the caffeine you’ve been living on. If […]
One of the long-standing jokes of librarianship is that we all got into the profession because “we love to read”, the punchline of course being that we’re all too overworked to read for fun. While I don’t think anyone should enter professional librarianship with the expectation that reading is a […]
I’ve just completed my first year of grad school at the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences. It has been an incredible experience. At various times and sometimes simultaneously, I’ve been overwhelmed, frustrated, excited, angry, amazed, and bored. Yet, through all these emotions, I have grown as a person […]
Ashley’s previous post on ethnography got me thinking about a topic that has been buzzing around in my mind–the importance of context for information and for learning. While Ashley focused on learning the tools of a different discipline, anthropology, for direct use in librarianship (i.e., librarian as ethnographer), I wonder […]
This semester at the University of North Texas I am taking SLIS 5445, History and Culture of Youth Services. A good portion of the class has focused on ethnography and its application in youth services. I won’t pretend to be an expert on this type of study and fieldwork. However, […]
Following in the footsteps of previous posts that focus on a specific field of librarianship (such as Annie’s post on art librarianship and Chris’s post on data curation) today I wanted to explore special collections librarianship. I’d like to work with digital projects for special collections or archives after graduating from Indiana […]
Good librarianship is an art. The distinct combination of talent, education, experience, and affinity that librarians possess must come together into a cohesive unit, guided by the librarian’s sensibilities, in order to provide the professional level of service expected and required of librarians today. Why, then, are our training models […]
Though the trademarks of the library profession like bridging the digital divide for children and adults, protecting freedom of information and promoting literacy, connect directly to service-learning, many LIS programs do not have a service-learning component. Service-learning programs connect LIS students with schools, libraries and other social service agencies to […]
In this, my second term of library school, one of my required foundational courses is “The Organization of Information.” This class is our theoretical precursor to more specific practical courses down the line – cataloging, metadata, and so on. We talk about Dewey and Brown and Bliss and Ranganathan, and […]
A classmate from my Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies class at San Jose State University sent me a LinkedIn connection request about a month ago prompting a total revamp of my oft-neglected and unfinished LinkedIn profile. I realized that my profile needed to be presentable if my classmates were going […]
Over the last couple of weeks, we have brought you a series of posts about preparing yourself for the job search. Ashley gave you general advice she gleaned from an interview with a hiring manager. Rose brought you advice on filling out your job application and creating a cover letter. […]
Photo credit: Lifehackery A few weeks ago, I signed up to attend McGill’s School of Information Studies’ annual career fair, which was held last week. Over thirty employers were going to be present from all over Quebec and Ontario. As the fair approached, the organizers began to send e-mails about […]
A few weeks ago, Rory Litwin posted a bit of a treatise on professionalism in librarianship on the Library Juice Press blog. He addresses several trends he notices in the deprofessionalization of librarianship, and though the blogosphere was only one point of many, that’s the issue that got the most […]
The word “curation” in common usage has lost some its meaning. We think of it more in terms of collector, aggregator or disseminator and not as “caretaker” as is its true definition. We future and current archivists and librarians, are all curators of information. We are shepherds and superintendents of […]
image under creative commons license: flickr/quinn.anya Ignore the graffiti above! HackLibSchool is all about how to make the most of your library program and how to engage the library profession at large. A running series of posts, Hack Your Program, offers overviews of the curricula and cultures of various library […]
To follow up on Ashley’s post earlier this week on advice from a hiring manager, I thought I’d share my own perspective. I recently served on a search committee for a tenure-track academic librarian position and reviewed applications for a paid (!) summer archival internship. Nothing I’m going to share […]
Guess what everyone? We are pleased to announce that we have our first Conversation Starter Proposal for ALA Annual this year! Conversation Starters are 45 minute, discussions focused on emerging topics and trends. Ours will be a facilitated conversation focused on issues surrounding the library school experience. We hope it […]
Last semester I took an Academic Libraries class that required me to interview an academic librarian. I reached out to Courtney Young to help me complete this assignment. Ms. Young is Head Librarian & Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Penn State Greater Allegheny and serves on the ALA Executive […]
This post was collaboratively written by Quasi-Con planners and School of Information Master’s candidates Kelly Davenport, Peter Timmons, Ilana Barnes (ALA chapter president), Kim Miller (vice president), Katy Mahraj (treasurer), Ryan Clement (webmaster), and Mariah Cherem (social media coordinator). The DIY Library Conference: A Quasi-Guide It was an experiment. When […]
