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News from the Department of Information Science (formerly SIM)

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Books and the future of reading

I spent yesterday, September 26th, at the Word on the Street Festival, the annual celebration of books and publishing.  As always, I saw people crowding around the library, bookstore and publisher displays, pitching their book ideas in the Pitch the Publisher event, listening to authors read from their latest books on the various festival stages, and carrying away shopping bags full of…books.  Book culture appears to be alive and flourishing in Halifax, but is traditional book culture fundamentally changing?  In his 2007 book provocatively titled The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young writes:

“For anyone brought up with a 21st C digital mindset, the printed book is an anachronism; books are everything that the new media technologies are not.  There is no motion, there is no noise.  There is no way to interact with the characters or the story.  There is no-one else involved.  Reading is a solitary experience.  You can’t talk back.  It’s just you and the words on the page.  And all you can do with those words is read them; apparently there is no other way to engage.  For a generation raised on newer media forms, the apparent one-sided conversation of a book defies logic.” (p. 66).  He concludes his book with the statement that “the immediate future of the book can be assured (long live the book) by disconnecting the ideas from the object, removing the physical constraints of dead trees and building a future without the codex.” (p. 166).

With the growing popularity of e-books, are we moving into a new book ecosystem…and what will this new ecosystem look like?  These are questions we will be discussing in INFO 6070 (Reading and Reading Practices) next term, but I’d welcome your comments now.

Showcasing MLIS Student Writers @ The Killam

Hello all, next Thursday, Sept. 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Special Collections room at the Killam (on the 5th floor), two MLIS 2nd-year students, Danny Jacobs and Nicole Dixon (that’s me!) will be reading their creative writing. Danny will be reading some poems, and I’ll be reading a story from my upcoming collection High-Water Mark, which will be published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2012. Hope to see you there!

Networking/Bonding

Look around – your classmates will be your peers, colleagues, competition and advisors. They will be part of what is good and not so good in the program and this bond is one of the best things that you will experience over the next two years.

SIM is especially good at encouraging and promoting alumni engagement so make sure that you continue to be part of this community. One of the best examples of networking can be observed by the actions of Norman Horrocks – he is a consummate networker and promoter of the SIM program. I can say without reservation that he is known worldwide as a leader in the profession and he effectively promotes SIM graduates at every opportunity.

The CLA Student Chapter Professional Mentoring Program is a wonderful opportunity to meet colleagues who are working in the field, who can provide candid advice on what working in an academic, special or public library is like and help introduce you to those already working in areas in which you have an interest. Take the time to be involved in the Program, if nothing else it provides you with the context to explore where you will enter the profession.

What has stayed with me the longest, as I reflect on my graduating class of 1980, is not the specifics of what I learned but those individuals who have been part of my professional and personal life for these past 30 years. Who else could I call when I got a job in a law library and did not have a clue what the Canadian Abridgment was, let alone how to use it! These people have been part of the good and bad, laughter and outrage of all my positions. Taking classes and working on projects is one part of forging these relationships, but don’t forget the fun times over beer and wine that balance the long hours of course work and part-time jobs.

Be bold and courageous over the next two years. Challenge what you hear, engage in discussion with your classmates and professors and be willing to acknowledge that your learning curve has only just begun. Lifelong learning is fundamental to our profession. The best foundation for lifelong learning is by forging those relationships and ultimately friendships with your classmates.

Remember This

It’s been a little while since I was at the School. Thirty years actually.  (I KNOW… I KNOW)  I was going to talk a little bit about that experience, but I am saving those stories for the Reception on Sept.23rd (shameless plug of course, but I am also really looking forward to meeting students as well as visiting with friends and colleagues.)

Why not call this “things your professors don’t really want you to think about, but think about it anyway.”  It will go hand in hand with my little talk next week.

It’s week two this week.  Week one doesn’t look like it’s changed much since I was a grad student.  Orientations, meet the profs, get a grip on courses, figure out your way around campus, and get to know who’s who, all that stuff.

This week?  Week two?  This is the week that perhaps a little bit of panic sets in because you’re starting to get into the course work and you are wondering “HOW am I ever going to get this all done?”  You will get it done.

Remember this – SIM is a professional programme teaching and indoctrinating you in the wonders and techniques of librarianship, information management and all that that entails. Your job is to absorb what you want, and what you need in order to develop competencies so you’ll  be hired in an area of interest to you– if that’s what you want.  More importantly it will give you a set of skills and intellectually thought provoking ideas that you may never have considered until you entered this programme.   And this is the education and learning that a grad school should deliver.  Keep your profs honest and challenge them to deliver on this!

Remember this – I don’t know a single employer who looks at grades.  I really am not as concerned  with straight As, or straight Cs. I want to know that you get how a collection is developed and used, how to talk to a client to elicit the information needed to get what the client needs, or that you understand how to ensure the right meta data is in the records so that information is retrievable.   I want to know that you are committed and interested in your chosen programme. And grades won’t tell me that.   OF COURSE you need and want those good grades for yourself and to be your best.  Going for perfection however, will make you crazy with the workload you’re about to encounter.  And from everything I know through out the past thirty years that has not changed.

Remember this – and don’t get all cranky on me when you read it – when you graduate, you still don’t know much.  You’ll have had two years of theory, maybe a practicum, and may be even some “real” experience in part time jobs, but all that theory really needs to be put to the practical test.  You’re not quite ready to run a library or information centre on your own – experience needs to come into play, as do good work mentors and colleagues from whom you can learn how to be a professional in a work environment.   Now, let me turn this around and let you know that the amount of knowledge that you will have coming out of the SIM programme will be impressive.  And we “seasoned professionals” talk about this all the time – the stuff you will be learning and bringing to our organizations helps the rest of us get up to speed on the  latest trends and ways of doing business- we most certainly need your talents, skills and “new” century knowledge.

So enjoy your two years at SIM; do well, but try not to stress about it much.  Figure out where you want to be, take the classes that will help you get there, and you’ll not just get through it, you’ll have had a rewarding and enjoyable two years that will ensure you want to come back thirty years later too.

Feeling lost in this busy universe of social networking sites? Social Media Lab (SMiLey) rating system can help!

Last week we unveiled a new Social Media Lab (SMiLey) rating system for our ongoing weekly reviews of various social networking sites and tools for scholars like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net .  The reviews are available at http://socialmedialab.ca. Our hope is that this new rating system will make the reviews easier to read and more useful to our readers.

The SMiLey rating system is built around a set of 5 different characteristics: Site Purpose, Findability, Usability, Sociability and Popularity. Each characteristic is rated on a 5-point scale. Each point is represented by a smiley face. One smiley face ) represents a site that has major deficiencies and five smiley faces ) ) ) ) ) indicate a site that has little or no deficiency.

Read more about SMiLey at http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=422

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