And Away We Go

This week I started the summer semester of library school.  I also started my internship at FAMU Law Library.  So far both are going well. 

For school, I’m taking Intro to Library Administration and the first part of Cataloging.  Both professors seem really nice and are very clear on their expectations for the semester.  There doesn’t seem to be too much work for either class; the main challenge is in the abbreviated nature of the semester.  Because everything has to be squeezed into the summer, that means that assignments will be due back-to-back until the semester is over.  But that’s ok.  When it’s done, I’ll have another full semester’s worth of classes under my belt.

On a side note, it turns out my professor for Library Admin is the new president of the Florida Library Association!  Talk about making connections.

As for my internship, that’s off to a great start, as well.  I’ve started going through materials for the archive and getting them organized.  It’s been great because the former university president’s assistant has been helping me unload items from his collection and get them ready for cataloging.  Since I’m just starting my cataloging class, I’m not doing any “official” cataloging of items, but I am getting a feel for what it means to prep and organize materials for archiving.

I’ve also gotten a chance to sit with the Tech Services department at FAMU to see how they operate.  Even after only two days, it’s already been really eye-opening.  I really didn’t know much about tech services before starting this internship, so I’m learning a lot.  For instance, FAMU uses a program called ALEPH for cataloging, acquisitions, and circ functions, and as it turns out, ALEPH is a program used by academic libraries all over the world.  Who knew?  I’ve gotten a taste for what goes into acquisitions, processing, and cataloging, and that’s been pretty fun, too.  I always thought I’d want to be a reference librarian, but who knows?  I may decide to work behind the library scenes.

That’s been my first week of the semester so far.  Everything’s going well, and I couldn’t ask for more.  I’ll keep checking in as the semester progresses to let you know how it goes!

Done…For Now

Last week, I finished my first semester of library school.  It went very well, and I feel good about it especially after finding out that I made all As for the semester.  I thought it would be a bit of a struggle with working 30 hours a week and taking a full load of classes, but it was a lot easier than expected.  Virtual learning was weird at first, but I got used to it really quickly.  It was so convenient to be able to handle schoolwork on my own time, especially with my work schedule.  I could interact with professors and classmates without having to make time to attend class or listen to lectures.  While I’m still more of a proponent of face-to-face learning, I can see how virtual learning has its distinct advantages.  Particularly for the working student.

I have now completed my basic reference class, my Foundations of Library Science class, and an instructional media class.  This summer, in addition to my internship at FAMU, I’ll be taking the first phase of cataloging and an introductory library admin class.  This summer is going to be very rewarding but also very busy.  In addition to my regular work schedule, I’ll be doing about 15 hours a week at the law library and taking an infamous cataloging class.  But I’m not scared; I love being busy and am kind of a workaholic, so it should be good times.  Busy times, but good.

For now, I’ve got about 2 weeks before the new semester and my internship start.  I’m going to milk this time for all its worth.  Lots of relaxing and catching up on books and movies I’ve missed throughout the semester.  Being busy is good and all, but a girl’s gotta have a break every once and awhile, too.

FLA Conference: Day Two

It’s been another fun-filled day at the FLA conference.  And sadly, it’s been my last day since I’ve got to head back to work tomorrow.

Rather than heading in super early today, I skipped the first sessions and got in just in time to watch the first round of the performers showcase.  This was an opportunity for children’s programmers to show off their talents and generate future bookings with local libraries.  Even though children’s programming isn’t exactly where my interests lie, I still had a fabulous time at the showcase.  There was lots of clapping, singing along, and laughter.  It was by far a great way to start the day.  FLA has posted a directory of performers, so feel free to check it out.  These people were really great.  Kind of made me want to be a kids’ librarian.  Just kind of.  :)

After that, I sat in on a great discussion of leadership and office politics.  We talked about conflict resolution, idea creation and implementation, and cross-departmental communication.  The talk was tailored to the library world, but really, the discussion could easily apply to just about any area of professional or personal interaction.  One point the speaker made that really hit home for the library field, though, was the idea that librarians in general tend to be people-pleasers who avoid confrontation at all costs.  This can be a real hassle in the workplace where conflict often needs to be dealt with directly and efficiently.  Not every problem can be smiled or researched away.  It takes work, but it’s well worth it in the end.

The last session I attended today was on top mobile apps for libraries.  The speaker didn’t just focus on library apps necessarily, but gave an overview of fun and useful apps that libraries can find ways of using in their outreach.  Some of them I’ve already been using and loving, like Flipboard and the OverDrive console.  And some I had no idea existed, like TinyVox and Dropbox.  I’m looking forward to exploring these mobile apps and seeing what I can do with them.

There was other stuff going on today, but that was about all I could handle before having to head home and crash on the couch.  Having fun in public and making new friends is EXHAUSTING.  Especially for a diehard introvert like me.  After having gone through this initial conference experience, my advice to my future self would be to take more breaks during the day.  I did a few self-imposed “introversion breaks” yesterday and today, but not nearly enough.  I gotta learn to pace myself if I’m ever going to make it through an entire conference in the future.

Despite the exhaustion, I had a great time these last couple of days, and I look forward to attending more library conferences in the future.  They really are as rewarding as everybody says.

FLA Conference: Day One, Evening

It has been a very fun-filled day at FLA 2012.  The information literacy panel this afternoon was quite enlightening.  I loved how each of the panelists brought out a different aspect of teaching information literacy to student patrons.  I only wish there were some information literacy panel for public librarians, but hey, maybe that’s a void I can help fill one day.

I started to check out the discussion on providing legal research for public library patrons but decided that would just be cheating.  So, instead I headed to a panel on using social media to target specific demographics.  That was a great panel.  I had no idea how specialized the audiences are for the different social media technologies that are out there.  Apparently, if you want to reach out to stay-at-home moms, you should use Pinterest.  If you want to get to tech-savvy young dudes, then Google+ is your thing.  If you want to reach pretty much everyone at once, use Facebook.  So much to keep in mind.

In the early evening, the vendor room opened up, and I filled up on food and swag.  Lots of cute pens and other doodads.  Lots of cheese and crackers.  The vendors are all so eager to get your attention; I felt kind of bad for only being a student and lowly library assistant.  They obviously want to talk to the people with the purse strings.  But hey, I’ll be there one day.

To top it all off, I enjoyed some downtime with fellow past and present USF lib school students at an informal reception being held in our hospitality suite.  There was more food (I stayed well fed today!), drinks, and lively conversation.  There were also some adorable candy cigarettes, in keeping with the Mad Men theme of the reception.  I had a great time getting to know my classmates and professors a little better, and also getting a chance to meet people who have successfully made it through the program and moved on to do interesting things in libraryland.

It’s been a great day, and I’m thoroughly, pleasantly exhausted.  Time to head to bed and rest up for tomorrow’s activities!

FLA Conference 2012: Day One, Morning

Hello, everyone, from the FLA annual conference. The theme for today is meeting people for real. I’ve met so many classmates and even a professor with whom I’ve had class all semester but never met in person. For the first time, I’m getting a chance to actually see their faces. That’s part of the fun of virtual learning, which is what library school is all about. 

I’ve also had the chance to meet a lot of really great new folks, too, which is quite the feat for me. There’s something oddly comforting about being surrounded by several other introvert-types. Don’t get me wrong, though, there are plenty of extroverts hanging around here as well.

So far, I’ve had coffee with a couple of lovely academic noobrarians from south Florida, and lunch with a couple of fun reference librarians from the Gulf Coast. I’ve heard a great talk from Michael Porter of Library Renewal on the importance of getting library folk together to create and source our own e-content. 

During the last couple of hours, I mingled with fellow Florida library students and browsed the poster presentations that have been contributed this year. The posters were really cool. I’d considered doing one this year but chickened out before coming up with a topic. After seeing what’s out there, I think I’m going to make the effort to contribute something for next year. I imagine it’s a really beneficial experience. 

Now I’m getting ready for a panel discussion on information literacy in academics. Should be good. I’ll check back in later! 

Conference, ho!

Tomorrow marks the opening day of the Florida Library Association’s annual conference at the Wyndham Resort in my hometown of Orlando, Florida.  Tomorrow also marks my first foray into the mystical land of the library conference. 

I’m really excited about learning more about the library profession and getting to know some great new people.  Plus, I hear that these shindigs tend to be a lot of fun. 

Granted, my usual conference experience has been more of the anime/scifi/supergeek variety.  For once, I’m actually going to have to wear professional attire to a conference, instead of dressing like my favorite character from a graphic novel.  But it’s all good.  I’ll still be surrounded by my beloved, and very loveable, fellow  geekazoids.  I actually have a feeling that many of the people at the library conference will be some of the same folks I see at my other conventions.  Just, you know, sans deguisement.

So, yeah, for the next two days I’ll be hobnobbing with Florida’s best and brightest library and information professionals.  Stay tuned for further posts directly from the conference.  Yippee!

Teamwork, teamwork…

“Everybody, everywhere! Teamwork, teamwork, everybody do your share!” ~Kids’ Chant

I just recently completed my first group project for library school.  After all the complaining I did before school started, I was all geared up for some very frustrating group experiences, but this project went off quite successfully. 

The assignment was to create a wiki for my Instructional Media class.  One of my groupmates got the ball on our project rolling by suggesting a topic for our wiki, and we all just ran with it from there.  Each person took an area to cover and did their work.  We stayed in touch when necessary and stayed out of each other’s hair when not.  It really was a fantastic group experience.  And we got a 100 for our effort!  (Check out our killer wiki here.)

One of the things I appreciated most about this group was the fact that it didn’t involve any over- or underworking.  Underworking groups are pretty self-explanatory.  You know the type, the group where no one wants to volunteer to do anything and nothing gets done unless you do it.  That can be the absolute worst.  But just as bad is the overworking group, where everyone wants to do everything and feels the need to constantly discuss it.  This is the group that sends out 50 emails an hour on the hour to debate everything from the placement of a comma to the benefits of using this or that audiovisual attachment.  These groups spend more time discussing the assignment than actually doing it, and the grades suffer.  In the end, once again, nothing gets done unless you do it; only with the overworking group, everyone complains about how what you did just wasnt’ “what was discussed.”

Lucky for me, this group project featured neither of those nightmares.  We got a great idea, divided up the work, and got ‘er done as the hillbillies say.  I know not all group work is this pleasant, but I’m still very thankful for this very painfree experience.  I’m keeping a note of all my groupmates in the event I have the option of working with some of all of them again.  Better the great group you know…

Calling All Interns!

I hate networking.  I’m not bad at it.  I just don’t like it.  I don’t like hobnobbing, schmoozing, shooting the breeze, or making connections.  When I’m in the mood—and being an introvert, that doesn’t happen often—I can be convinced to enjoy meeting new people.  But I abhor the idea that with each new person I meet, I’ve got to mentally cataglogue what I can get out of them for my future.  That just sucks.

Thus, it is with great pride that I tell you, dear blog reader, that I got an internship for this summer.  Without doing any of those traditional networking activities that I hate so much.  It all just kind of fell in my lap, a much-appreciated blessing from above.

Earlier this year, I had to do a tour of a library for my Foundations of Library Science class and chose to tour the Law Library at FAMU Law School.  (I wrote about my tour here.)  During my tour, I happened upon the library director who was on her way into her office.  Thinking I was a student there for something else, she asked me if I was there to ask about the internship.  I told her I was not but that I’d be interested in an internship, and she asked me to leave my name and contact information with my tour guide on the way out.  I did and emailed my resume when I got to work that morning, then promptly forgot about it.  I figured they already had a student in mind for the internship and the director was just being nice.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I got an email from the Acquisitions Librarian at the Law School, wondering if I would still be interested in doing the internship this summer.  Um, yeah!  Well, I didn’t say that exactly.  I put it a lot more professionally, but you get the drift.  The librarian, who will be supervisor, even went to the trouble to talk with the fieldwork coordinator at my school to make sure that I’d be able to get credit for the internship.  (It turns out my future supervisor is an alum from my library school and a former mentee of the fieldwork coordinator.  Talk about connections!)  Typically, students don’t do their fieldwork until the end of their time in library school, but the coordinator agreed to let me do my internship early if the host institution felt it would be a good fit.  Yippee!

Last week, I met with my soon-to-be supervisor and the library director and I got to hear about the main project I’ll be working on.  FAMU’s last president has retired to the Law School and is serving as a Professor Emeritus there.  Along with his teaching expertise, he’s also brought along a roomful of memorabilia, and I will be responsible for working with his assistant to organize and informally catalogue all that material.  The goal is to get everything ready to be developed into some sort of digital and physical archive to document the history of FAMU Law School specifically, and FAMU as a historically Black college in general.  They’re hoping to be able to join these materials to a nationwide archive of HBCU history that is already in progress.  

I’m really excited about this opportunity.  On top of the great archiving project, I’ll also have the chance to rotate through the Law Library’s departments and learn how everything works.  It’s going to be a very educational summer.

So yes, even as a bookwormish introvert, it is possible to get a great internship without any smarminess.  I will keep you all posted on how it goes, but suffice it to say, I am very, very excited!

Valencia East: The Grand Tour

Yesterday I took a tour of Valencia College East Campus library for an assignment in my Foundations of Library Science class.  My brother is a student at Valencia and was sweet enough to let me tag along while he went to super math, mega calculus class (my brother is studying to be a computer programmer, way more numerical logic smarts than I could ever hope for).

I have to note that I was counting on the general librarian attitude of loving the job and loving to talk about the job for this tour.  My mother was appalled when I came downstairs in yoga pants, my Transformers t-shirt, and flip flops.  “That’show you’re dressing for your interview with fellow professionals???”  I assured her it wasn’t an interview but a tour (she wasn’t assured), then I assured her that librarians were laid-back and that I was going more for the student vibe.  I also assured her that I could show up naked and if I showed even a passing interest in what the librarians do, they would jump at the chance to share their knowledge and love of the profession with me.  (She still wasn’t assured.)

It ended up okay, though, because just as I suspected, the part-time librarian working the reference desk was gracious enough to walk me around Valencia’s library and answer all of my questions.  I could tell he absolutely loved his job, and honestly, that’s one of the things I love about this profession.  It’s great to see so many people who love what they do.

Valencia’s library is not so much a library as a learning resource center.  The first floor is comprised of row upon row of computers, a testing center, group study rooms for tutoring, and a circulation desk for math technology—think big fancy calculators like what my brother uses in his super math, mega calculus class.  On the second floor is the library proper with books, periodicals, a few computers, and the circ and ref desks.  It’s small and cozy, but that’s just for show.  From what my guide told me, since a huge chunk of Valencia’s students are distance learners, a huge chunk of their library resources are in digital form.

I really liked Valencia library.  There were a ton of students in there, and it was even the Monday right after Spring Break.  I took that as a good sign.  Valencia students aren’t afraid to take advantage of all the resources their library has to offer.  I think I’m going to be on the look-out for any future openings that pop up there.

Teach a Person to Fish…

“Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.” ~Chinese Proverb

One of the most rewarding moments in my job is when someone asks me a question, and then immediately afterward, asks, “How did you find that?”  It really highlights for me the importance of teaching information literacy as an information professional.

I have to confess, when I first considered getting into librarianship, my initial thoughts were, Yeah, I can be a librarian instead of being an educator.  Because I don’t know if I have the patience or desire to teach anyone anything.  Ha!  I realize now how incredibly naive I was.  Librarians are educators.  We manage information, but we also teach people how to access the information that we manage.  And this is a very important part of our jobs.

Rather than looking at the teaching aspect of my job as a burden, I prefer to look at it as a benefit.  To me.  (Things always seem better when you can find a way to relate it to yourself.  Egoism can be a beautiful thing.)  If I teach this patron how to look up directions on Google Maps, then I don’t have to look up directions for them every time they decide to leave their house.  And yes, there are some patrons who will call the library for directions every time they leave their houses.  If I show this patron how to find social science articles on SIRS, then I don’t have to look up the articles every time she has a paper to write.  The next time those patrons call, I can help them with something else.  I’ve made my job more interesting and less redundant.  I’ve made their lives more information literate.  It’s a win-win.

Sure, it takes a special kind of patience to teach anyone anything.  I find this to be particularly true when dealing with octogenarians who’ve been recently gifted with e-readers.  Oh, boy.  Talk about patience in teaching.  But by the end of the 30-minute, one-on-one phone tutorial, that’s one more octogenarian who knows how to access her beloved Janet Evanovich novels on a Nook.  Without having to make any painstaking trips to the library to physically pick up books that are getting too heavy for her to carry.  And then having to slug those same heavy books back.  Her life has gotten a whole lot easier.  And at this point, she deserves it.

So, I find that I’m really warming up to my new role as educator.  I’m still not ready to jump into an actual classroom anytime soon, but I’m enjoying being able to help others help themselves.