I think DH goes to same school as you–everything you say matches up with how online courses are handled. First class he took, the teacher misspelled “capitalism” in his biographical information section. The vast majority of students and teachers, well, seem to have the same intelligence and reasoning ability of Yahoo message board posters.
After two grueling classes of figuring out that he was overkilling to get an A, DH’s been slowly cutting down on the effort bit by bit to see what’s the minimum he can do and still get an A. He’s finishing in 75% of the time that he used to, and he hasn’t yet not gotten an A yet.
I don’t know about the poster, but I’m telling you right now as a working librarian that answer is perfectly all right. That said, can I interest you in a paper index?
The course I took was not required (my understanding is that the web page aspect is now required in one of the core classes, but I could be wrong). I did choose to take the class in which we learned to hand code html, css and javascript and weren’t allowed to use an editor. I knew it would be a good skill - I use it less in my current job than in my former job, but I do still occasionally use it.
Every time I got frustrated in library school because it was so stupid and undervalued me so much, I’d remind myself that all my troubles came from my high standards and that if I just drove through campus real slow with the window down they’d probably chuck a diploma in.
In other words, you know you’re not going to flunk. I don’t think it’s possible to flunk a class in library school. You have to calm the part of you that has high standards.
No thanks; been there, done that. I’m 54, and although I’m not a librarian, I’ve done my share of bibiographic research, some for friends for money and some just for fun (!). I remember looking through 30 years of the New York Times index, and what was it called, Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature? As well as other indices to periodicals in more technical fields.
I helped my ex work on a paper on toxoplasmosis – even though I don’t have medical knowlegd, I was able to get the search terms from her and report back on what I had found. Then she pointed me in the direction of what she was looking for while I tracked down the articles she needed from the medical journals, and retrieved them from the medical libraries at Case Western Reserve and University Hospital’s libraries.
I helped a pastor of my father’s church track down an article in Reader’s Digest that he remembered reading “sometime in the 50s” about the 23rd Psalm and the life of a shepherd in Palestine.
But the Internet has brought about so many changes for the better that I can’t imagine a professor forbidding you to use it to locate material. I can understand that he would want you to know the old methods, but to limit you to only the old methods seems silly, and like I was pointing out, not that hard to work around.
Well, I did have reference questions with “scavenger hunt” type assignments where your explanation of how you found an answer was worth more points than the actual answer. There were some in my Gov Docs class that were just mind-blowingly difficult.
yes. I finished at “the # 1 LIS school in the country” without breaking a sweat*. I read almost nothing in the last year. When I did read, I found the material interesting, if a bit pedantic. There seems to be a sort of bending over backwards to include everyone/PC-ness to LIS articles–I see it in nursing articles as well. It can be ponderous and a heavy slog to read.
*I do not say this to brag about my supposed intellectual prowess. I am above average and have a large vocabulary, nothing more. I am somewhat appalled that I could coast as much as I did and still get As. I think it is almost impossible to flunk a library course or even get a C. I did get one B–in cataloging, which, since she hadn’t taught me anything, I was somewhat proud of. Perhaps LIS would have been harder if I hadn’t worked in a service industry with many of the same issues for 20+ years. I kept thinking to myself, “been there, done that” with so many issues.
I do feel I missed out on the real library science–what that is, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps if I had taken Government documents or IT classes, it would have been more of a challenge (I know it would have been, but those classes didn’t fit with my schedule or my focus). I still wish I had been able to take the History of the Book and Adult Literacy–neither of which were offered after my first semester (when I was taking the required classes).
I don’t know about the curriculum everywhere, but that was a major problem where I went - you had six required classes, half of which were horseshit at least. Probably more. You had six electives. That’s it.
The thing is, half the time you end up in a completely different area than you started out in anyway, so you ended up taking the “wrong” electives. I wanted to go into preservation, barring that tech services. I ended up a public librarian, emphasis on the “public” part. I didn’t take any of those classes! (Didn’t matter, of course.) At the time there’s no way I would have touched a children’s services class, not least because while there are tons of dedicated children’s services professionals around the only people who were taking those classes were the dumbest of the dumb. Now I’d like to move to a branch and do more youth services, and I’m a little sad that I didn’t get any of it in school. I also didn’t come into librarianship via teaching, either, as many people did, so I never got any of that child development stuff anywhere. So of course all my electives were preservation and serials (which I do do, but it’s different issues in a public library) and indexing and cataloging. Oh, and I took gov docs just because the guy teaching it knows more about gov docs than, well, anybody. It was by far the hardest class I took in library school, and certainly had the most demanding assignments. Gov docs is hardcore.
Things library school will never prepare you for :
Crying patrons (In my line of work, horrible family circumstances, like dying children, are commonplace.) I keep a box of kleenex handy.
Mentally ill patrons
The sheer absurdity of some reference questions
The sheer boredom of book processing, aka slapping labels on books
Things which library school prepared me well for, and which I use :
Good HTML skillz
Good search skills
Things which, while I may never forget them, I will NEVER use :
The ability to make/type 100 card catalog cards. No kidding. I went to library school 10 years ago. I hate that professor. True loathing. Tenure.
Mountains of Dialog searching. My professor made us print all of our searches so he could read them for grading. Tree murder, anyone? 3,000 pieces of wasted paper. Guess he never heard of frickin e-mail. (Or diskettes, for that matter!)
Every single print “reference source” we learned about. Eight years as a professional librarian, and I’ve never used (or needed) any of them. My Stedman’s Medical Dictionary is the only print reference that I have on hand!
Yeah, I use print reference somewhat rarely because of the department I work in, but the general reference people use it a ton. Thing is, you have to know a lot about your collection and really have a lot of experience in it to use it, because a lot of that stuff doesn’t come up in a search. I mean, yeah, you know the major sources you have and when to use them, but there’s a whole lot of depth to any good reference collection that you can really use for patrons if you can think of 'what was that book with the green cover that we just got…" We took a little refresher course over there with one of the general reference librarians and she just blew me away with her print knowledge.
What nobody uses anymore is ready reference. World Almanac, that sort of thing - that’s what Google has replaced.
Not you, and not me personally, but a fellow student when I was in library school got a call late one Saturday night that one of our classmates had apparently given his name as the person to contact … wait for it … when he had been involuntarily admitted to the state mental hospital earlier that day.
Agreed. I keep it for some stuff that I can get to really fast that I know is authoritative. I wouldn’t imagine a general user thinking about ready reference at all.
The only ready reference anybody I know really uses at all anymore is the Statistical Abstract. Oh, and I think we do keep one of those sports almanacs by the phone because it’s the easiest way to settle bar bets.
ETA - the one Luddite tendency I see in older fellow librarians is the damned phone book. People call all the time asking for numbers and they haul the phone book out! Meanwhile they’re sitting right in front of a web browser with a Google search field. I assure you, no matter how fast your lightening fingers do the walking skillz are, I can type in “Smith Plumbing Supply Columbia, SC” way faster than you, and then I can give them directions too.
My experience at UCLA was that the subject content is certainly not inherently difficult. But in terms of the amount of work we were asked to do, it wasn’t always easy.
In my first term, I actually did have some difficulty in descriptive cataloging, because I didn’t understand at first what the professor really wanted in our assignments. That probably has more to do with me, than with him, but once I was clear on the requirements, I did fine.
Print reference? That is something I had never even known about before library school. Now I use it frequently. For certain things, a print reference book is the only place you can find them. For other things it is worth consulting a print reference source as, although you can find the information elsewhere, in the print source it is all there in one location.
That said, can I interest you in a paper index?