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In the summer of 2018, I immersed completely in my program, leaving my teaching career behind. While I had enjoyed my classes in the Fall and Spring, I felt as if I had one foot on either side a significant divide. I could never completely separate myself from an education perspective because I was still teaching. That summer, however, I leaped over the boundary by taking two ten-week courses, effectively scrubbing my mind clean of anything but information science. I was also taken on as a summer intern (as I transitioned into the school year, I continued my projects as a volunteer) at the Arizona State Museum where I began learning the basics of digital archiving.
Over the course of the summer, I became confident in my choices as I realized how my new career path fits my personality in a way that teaching never did. That truth was such a shock to me as I had wanted to be an educator since I was five years old and spent thirteen years as a devoted educator. I was an excellent teacher and I enjoyed it, but the things I learned in my MLIS program forever shifted the way I see the world. I love that this field is growing in so many unique directions and that each day there are new questions being posed that we must seek answers to. Unlike teaching, I never felt locked in to any specific path and my eagerness to move into the more specialized courses in the second half of my program grew by leaps and bounds.
LIS 504 - Foundations of Library and Information Services
LIS 504 - Foundations of Library and Information Services
Image courtesy of realviewdigital.com
As my first true graduate course, I was well and truly overwhelmed by the breadth of material covered by Professor Gina Macaluoso. But I can genuinely say that, at the end of the course, I had a much more realistic and grounded view of what library and information science is and entails. I also started to see how expansive the field is and the multiple directions it is growing. Competency B5, “Students will demonstrate knowledge of types of library and information professions, settings, services, and roles and be able to analyze key issues and potential approaches to these in the areas of their career interest,” was one we explored at great depth through several assignments, but for me, through the interview and tour assignment and my subsequent final paper that was inspired by it.
Professor Macaluoso required us to tour an institution and interview an information professional. Knowing that archiving was my area of interest, I met with Mary Graham, head archivist, at Arizona State Museum. She took us through a brief history of the ASM Archives, discussing how they handle incoming collections, requests for information access, protection of sacred knowledge and the realities of trying to preserve objects in a modern archive in one of the oldest buildings on the University of Arizona campus. Spending time hearing about her professional experience helped me to understand how complex the role of archivist is, going beyond a job to being a liaison to community members and a supporter of academic research. She answered so many questions but she also brought even more to the forefront of my mind, particularly related to the digital side of the archiving world. Prior to that meeting, I had been planning to write my issues paper on professional development in the field. I subsequently changed my topic to examine the pros, cons and complications of archives trying to broach the digital arena. This issues paper allowed me to explore key issues in the archiving field, namely the tug of war between maintaining archival tradition and creating digital access to different objects. Truly, this paper helped me to make the decision to pursue graduate certificates in Archival Studies and Digital Information Management in addition to my master’s degree.
LIS 506 - Research Methods
LIS 506 - Research Methods
The process that I worked through with my partner in this class was the first extended research project I had every truly embarked upon. It was also my first opportunity to perform a long-term collaboration resulting in a huge deliverable. Competency A2, “Students will demonstrate understanding of the nature of research, research methods and the role of research in library and information science and additionally, demonstrate the ability to apply research findings to practical problems,” basically distills the entire semester into a single sentence. Professor Merry began by teaching us about research methods as well as the theoretical pursuit of knowledge. While examining concrete things like the ethics of studies and double blind refereeing, we also dug deeply into epistemology, the science of knowledge, observing the patterns of ideas from their germination to their acceptance and then ultimate discard.
Image courtesy of Optimal Workshop Blog
Exactly as A2 states, our academic work was the backdrop for application of the research methods we were learning as we tackled a collaborative project on a self-selected LIS-relevant topic. My partner, Shaquille John, and I opted to look at how library outreach can be used to provide technological education about personal information management to patrons. It had a distinctly educational bend to it because I was trying to incorporate something I had a modicum of knowledge and comfort with. Shaquille and I worked the entire research process: we submitted a research proposal; gathered sources for an annotated bibliography; performed a literature review three times, each at a different depth; generated hypothetical surveys, lesson plans and participant selection methods; used hypothetical data to determine proficiency, gather patron feedback and examine the standard deviation of our fictitious participants and finally generated a cohesive and relatively concise paper with our findings. Never had I so completely worked the research process and my artifacts bear witness to that journey. No sooner did we learn about something in class then we were turning around and applying it to our project, producing something that demonstrated not just our understanding but our ability to generate research-related documents about LIS.
LIS 517 - Introduction to Digital Cultures
LIS 517 - Introduction to Digital Cultures
I truly did not know what to expect from my Introduction to Digital Cultures class, especially given that we started the semester discussing Plato’s thoughts on poetry. Not quite what I had been expecting, but it laid the groundwork for the expansion of the concept of what digital means. In our world today, digital and technology go hand in hand but it is important to understand that things like the printing press were once cutting edge technology that had a profound effect on the world around them.
Competency A3, “Students will demonstrate understanding of the use of information and communication technologies including social aspects of information in providing information resources and services in libraries and other information environments,” was truly explored in this class. Professor Laura Lenhart had us diving into the original hacking - phreakers - and taking apart the social elements of hacking as both a hobby and a professor. We examined the layers of the internet, looking beyond the usual LIS focuses, to the different communities to be found, how they interact with each other, what communication looks like and what people gain from this world. Truly, it helped me to see the internet in a completely new way as I realized its different potentials and pitfalls.
Ultimately, we produced an Digital Manifesto declaring what we believe to be true based on our semester-long examination. This opportunity to really examine what digital culture is and what it means to different people allowed me to reframe how I see digitization as part of the archiving world, most especially how things like social media can be used to engage patrons with the archives and its events.
One of the most fascinating parts of our class related to Competency A2, “Students will demonstrate understanding of the nature of research, research methods and the role of research in library and information science and additionally, demonstrate the ability to apply research findings to practical problems.” Once again, I embarked on a lengthy research journey, this time about the appeal of fanfiction for its writers. I was responsible for a website where I periodically posted updates on my research process and I made use of Tumblr’s chat function to interview different fanfic authors, including one in Winnipeg and the other in the United Kingdom! The interview process was something I really enjoyed because it is a type of research I had not had the chance to explore it in any depth prior to this project.
I truly saw how the research I gathered was informed by the individual interviews, bringing a more intense perspective the generalized information in the various articles I read. While I enjoyed the collaborative research process I engaged in during the fall semester in LIS 506, this research process filled in some of the missing components from that experience. I was very pleased with my final product and I believe that working with the website updates and having to present my thoughts on the process enriched my writing.
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