Tag: professional development
Fellow SLIS-Indy grads Erin and Karl recently wrote about their job searches: Erin’s put out zillions of applications and hasn’t gotten much back and Karl’s been making do with part-time work but wants more. Because of the move and wrapping things up in Indiana, I’m just now starting to get serious about my job hunt, but the relative lack of luck among people I know from my program got me thinking about how to keep our skills and knowledge fresh while we’re looking for our first full-time job.
I wrote a post for the YALSA blog about just that, outlining what I’ve been doing. In short, I’m reading YA lit, keeping up on listservs and blogs and Twitter feeds, doing blogging of my own, doing some more scholarly reading to fill in the gaps from my MLS program, taking advantage of professional development activities, and volunteering (well, looking for volunteer opportunities, at least). Read the full post for more!
June 11, 2010
Earlier this semester I submitted some articles for my school’s ALA Student Chapter’s newsletter. Two of them were accepted and the newsletter was published online today.
The SLIS program at IU is split between two campuses: Bloomington focuses more on academic librarianship, rare books, and the information science side of the profession; the Indianapolis campus does more with public librarianship and school librarianship (it’s actually the only place in the state you can get your school media specialist certification). But because each ALA-accredited program can only have one student chapter, the IU ALA-SC (I’m not sure which website is official, this one or this one) is at Bloomington.
The Indy program is starting to provide some similar opportunities and services to its students with ALISS, the Association for Library and Information Science Students, which was resurrected last fall. Erin and Andy and I are stepping down as officers, but we have a great incoming group of officers with high ambitions and new committees and programs planned, and I’m hoping that next year ALISS and the IU ALA-SC will be able to work together more closely.
Anyway, although the IU ALA-SC is headquartered in Bloomington, students in the program at Indianapolis are welcome to submit articles for the newsletter, attend events, and apply for scholarships. I think Indy students have to work a little harder to stay informed about opportunities organized by Bloomington students and faculty, but subscribing to the Bloomington listserv in addition to the Indy listserv helps a lot.
This semester’s newsletter theme was conferences and since the call for articles went out just as I was returning from PLA2010, I thought I’d write a couple about different topics. “Volunteering at Conferences” and “Conferences 102: A Few More Words of Advice” were accepted and published in the newsletter . A third article, “Attending a Conference as a Student,” was not, so I thought I’d post it here.
Attending a Conference as a Student
Ideas in this article emerged in part from conversations with other Indianapolis SLIS students including Erin Milanese and Katie Nakanishi.
Attending a conference while you’re still in school is a great opportunity. Not only will you have the chance to learn a lot and meet other professionals, but your student status confers unique benefits as well. If you’re thinking about attending a conference before you graduate, consider the following.
While you may feel like a cash-strapped student, conference fees will never be lower than while you’re still in school. Registration fees may be half or even a quarter of the regular member rate. There are also travel and conference grant opportunities for students and first-time attendees. Lodging and transportation are also part of conference costs, but your classes are full of potential roommates and maybe even road trip partners.
Your student status also grants you more flexibility once you arrive at the conference. Even if you’re working in a library already, if you’re footing the bill, you get to decide what sessions you attend. While you’ll want to learn about your current or future specialization, if something totally outside of your area looks interesting, go! Conferences are a great opportunity to stretch yourself, and while you’ve been learning a lot of theory in the classroom, it’s at a conference that you can see where best practices and research meet real-world constraints and inspiration.
While you’re at the conference, your primary mission is to keep an open mind and just soak up everything you can. Conferences, especially national ones, give you the chance to see libraries from a multitude of perspectives you might not get just by taking classes. Local and state-wide conferences can also teach you practical, hands-on tips you may not get in the classroom.
Make sure to take advantage of job placement services or resume reviews, too. People are on hand to help you assess your own strengths and weaknesses and help you turn a critical eye to your resume. Even if you’re not looking for a job, these services can help you decide what your next professional step might be.
Your conference experience shouldn’t be all work and no play, though. Plan to go to a social event outside of the official conference schedule. Many ALA divisions and roundtables have happy hours where you can mingle more casually with other professionals. And if you’ve already made new friends during the conference, going out for dinner or drinks afterward gives you a chance to get to know them better and expand your professional network.
Being a student and not having any purchasing power in your library means you’re not a potential sale for vendors in the exhibit hall, but you can still learn a lot from them about the different products they offer. Just be sure to be clear that you’re a student and be willing to decline freebies or to defer to librarians who may be researching a purchase. Talking to publishers can be a good way to pick up books and ARCs if you want to get a head start on writing professional reviews. If you do pick up swag, paying your own way at the conference means that you actually get to keep all of those sweet giveaways (especially the books!) rather than turning it over to your library when you return.
Going to a national conference may seem intimidating, but as a student it gives you a chance to get your feet wet and see how conferences work so that when you attend another one as an official representative from your library, you’ll be better equipped to pick sessions and to navigate the exhibit hall. It also gives you an idea of what presentations are like so that once you have some accumulated wisdom of your own, you’ll be ready to present at a conference yourself.
Conferences are useful no matter what stage of your career you’re in. Being a student means cheaper conference rates, built-in travel partners, flexibility, having your mind blown by the wide world of librarianship beyond the classroom, opportunities for networking, and lots of free stuff. How can you pass that up?
May 12, 2010
PLA2010 ended a month ago and it simultaneously feels like it just happened and like it happened a million years ago. But now that the requisite 30 days has passed since I wrote my posts about the conference for the PLA blog, I can have the full text available here. So in case you missed them the first time around:
Writing for the PLA blog was a really neat experience; if you’re attending a conference and have the chance to be a volunteer blogger, I’d highly recommend it. It gave me the opportunity to take time during the conference to think about what I was hearing and doing, it gave me another chance to engage in discussion, and it was honestly just fun.
April 28, 2010
About two years ago, the Indiana legislature voted to institute a property tax cap of 1% for residential homes effective in 2010, and Governor Mitch Daniels signed the bill into law. This is bad news for libraries because in Indiana, most of the library’s income is from property taxes (about 80%, in fact, according to the director of the Allen County Public Library). Budgets were cut, hiring was reduced, and cost-saving measures were introduced. The St. Joseph County Public Library said it’d cut all its Saturday hours. A year after the tax caps were announced and revenue cuts had begun, most of the library branches in Vigo County were closed. This fall the Anderson Public Library cut its hours. And yesterday, the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library (IMCPL) announced that they’d likely be closing six branches and cutting 55 jobs. Back in January one poll showed the governor’s approval rating was about 65% across the state with his highest rating (around 70%) in the Indy area, and about 73% of people approve of the tax caps. Libraries provide things like story times and recreational reading and fun programs, but we also provide absolutely essential resources like computer and Internet access and assistance in filing for unemployment online. I’m really hoping that when library services, hours, and staff get cut, people reconsider their approval of property tax caps, but since even cutting fire departments by about 30% hasn’t convinced people that the tax caps are a bad idea, I just don’t know how hopeful I can be.
In more cheerful news, IUPUI’s University Library recently got rid of about half of its microfilm collection and the librarian in charge of the weeding project, Mindy Cooper, was determined to keep it out of the landfill. According to Mindy, a lot of it went to students at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI, Indiana art teachers, and the Eiteljorg Museum, and one of the things it was used for was to make this collage by Alisa Nordholt-Dean at the Eiteljorg. What a neat reuse of discarded library materials!
Finally, the application process for YALSA’s mentoring program began on Monday (here’s the official blog post). They’re looking for librarians who’ve been working with teens in public or school libraries for at least six years to be paired up with new librarians and graduate school students to form a mutually beneficial mentoring relationship. The application forms are due by 30 June and reference forms should be submitted by 7 July. Participants will be notified of their selection in mid-September. I’ve applied and I’m hoping to be selected, but regardless of whether or not I’m invited to participate, I think this is a really cool program and I’m glad YALSA is offering this opportunity not only for new librarians to have guidance, advice, and a source of encouragement, but also to give more seasoned librarians a chance to pass on some of their wisdom and learn new things themselves.
April 10, 2010
Portions of this post were originally written for the PLA Blog. ALA holds the copyright to this text; it is reproduced here with permission.
Yesterday I volunteered at the PLA Membership Booth between the first and second sessions of the day. It was a lot of fun and a nice way to just chat with people who came by. There was one librarian from Chicago who said she was so happy to see young people entering the profession who were passionate about the issues we stand for and we got into a great conversation about literacy and libraries.
I also answered a lot of questions and it just struck me as funny that I was playing reference librarian to a convention of librarians. Just like at the reference desk, most of the questions I fielded were directional and ready reference inquiries: the ALA Store is right over there under the giant hanging sign that says “ALA Bookstore.” Yes, I can look up where that publisher is and yes you can use the conference program to decide what session you’re going to and yes you may look at this map and yes you may take anything on this table and yes I know where the first aid station is and yes I’d be happy to pass along to the higher-ups that you’re loving this conference. Even we the information professionals need a little help sometimes!
I also spent a fair amount of time on Thursday and Friday cruising around the exhibit hall checking out the different vendors and publishers and other groups. Since I’m not in a position to buy anything for a library right now, I wasn’t of much interest to most of the vendors, but I did have a long and helpful conversation with the rep from Lifelong Education @ Desktop (LE@D). They provide online continuing education classes for cheap–and if you’re a resident of a member state like Indiana, you may even have the cost of your classes subsidized by your state library. The rep mentioned that most librarians seem to wind up in management almost on accident, so it’s important to develop your leadership skills all along your career so you’re prepared. She was very friendly and very helpful and I’m definitely going to keep their classes in mind after I’ve graduated.
One of the other long conversations I had in the exhibit hall was with the reps from Bluewater Productions–you may know them as the publishers of (among other things) the Female Force comics highlighting women in politics, Stephanie Meyer, and JK Rowling. Graphic novels and comics have so long been a “boy thing,” so I’m glad to see publishers opening up content to appeal to a wider audience. I wanted to know, though, if this was a women-driven initiative, so I asked the guys at the booth if they had female writers and illustrators and inkers (they do, and they’re recruiting more) and if any of the executives of Bluewater were women (half of them are). I picked up a couple of their comics and I’m looking forward to looking them over in more detail. I’m also interested in checking out Girl Comics, part of Marvel’s “Marvel Women” project; the first issue came out earlier this month.
My first conference was ALA Annual last year and I found the exhibit hall there with its roving throngs of librarians, massive vendor displays, and general warehouse proportions kind of overwhelming. The exhibit hall at PLA was a lot more manageable. I also really enjoyed being able to help and connect with librarians who visited the PLA booth–I’d highly recommend volunteering for that at the next conference you attend.
March 27, 2010
This post was originally written for the PLA Blog. ALA holds the copyright to this text; it is reproduced here with permission.
Since I’ll be graduating in just six short weeks, I was a little disappointed to see that there wouldn’t be a job placement center this year at PLA. I checked out ALA’s site on finding a job, but I wanted something more personal and dialogue-driven, so I made sure to sign up for the resume review clinic yesterday.
I’m going to be totally honest here: the half-hour meeting I had with Miguel Figueroa, the director of ALA’s Office for Diversity and Spectrum, was hands-down the best resume review I’ve ever had. He was very detailed in his advice, explained the rationale behind his suggestions, and was attentive to my concerns and the thought process behind what I’d originally written. He didn’t just give me generic resume advice or assess how well my resume matched an accepted format; he read every word on my resume and told me what I could do to strengthen every single section. He also did a really good job of helping me identify my strengths and what the most impressive parts of each of my jobs and skill areas were and how to best communicate that.
I’m going to have to set aside a large chunk of time when I get home to completely overhaul the design and content of my resume, but I feel a lot more confident about being able to put my best foot forward. It’s just a shame that there aren’t more opportunities like this available here, and that the resume review clinic was only for a few hours on one day. It’s a great service and I’m really glad I was able to take advantage of it.
March 26, 2010
This post was originally written for the PLA Blog. ALA holds the copyright to this text; it is reproduced here with permission.
My name is Gretchen and I am not an audiobook person. Oh, I understand why our patrons like them–and why they can be such a boon to reluctant readers–but they’re just not my thing. I’m a very visual person and my mind tends to wander just listening to a story and then I realize I don’t know what’s going on and I have to go back and sometimes the voices don’t sound the way I think they should and I’d much rather just have the book in front of me.
But for my car trip today (I drove from Indianapolis to Chicago so I’d have a direct flight to Portland) I stopped by my local public library and checked out a copy of A MANGO-SHAPED SPACE by Wendy Mass after my young cousin recommended it to me. And while I had my usual trouble with staying focused and accepting different interpretations of lines of dialogue or the delivery of pauses, I did enjoy being able to make progress on a book while I was driving. I don’t think this experience is going to make me an audiobook person, but I do like them a little more now.
Normally when I fly I’m alone, so flights–especially longer ones–put me in a reflective mood. This evening I was thinking about this conference, of course, and what I’d like to get out of it. I’m in my final semester of my MLS at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and while I attended ALA last summer and a few regional conferences since then, I’m still pretty new to conferences and honestly, to librarianship. While I learned a lot at ALA and the conference experience was incredibly energizing and the entire thing was a pretty mind-blowing experience, it was also a fairly solitary experience. I didn’t know many people who were going and I didn’t meet as many new people as I wanted. But for PLA I know a lot more people who are here and I’m really looking forward to spending time with them–and to meeting lots of new people. In fact, I’ll be at the PLA membership booth (#2255) from 9:45-10:30 on Friday and I’d love it if you stopped by!
I’m also looking forward to blogging about the experience. You can follow me on Twitter (@librarified), too, if you’d like.
Seeing a real actual snow-topped mountain during our descent this evening was thrilling (I grew up amidst the flat cornfields of northern Indiana, so any sort of topological variation is exciting) and now, after months of anticipation, I am finally in Portland joining thousands of other librarians for learning and networking and having fun.
March 24, 2010
Nancy Bertolotti wrote earlier this month for the YALSA blog about blogging as a professional development tool. She suggests that blogging gives the writer the opportunity to network with authors (a review she wrote of one author’s book led to an interview with that author) and colleagues, as a way to practice writing, as a demonstration of knowledge or skill, and as a way of gaining experience with social networking tools. I agree with all of this and on a personal level, I’ve enjoyed blogging because it’s gotten me thinking about library stuff more often and in a more structured sort of way. Bertolotti also mentioned that she’s a recent grad and that she feels like her blog addresses a lot of different sorts of topics but that once she finds a job, her focus will narrow–another feeling I share with her.
She also asserted that blogging was a form of peer-reviewed writing:
Blogging on a professional site like the YALSA Blog might even be considered a peer reviewed form of writing. You know you will be corrected or asked for clarification if you post something that is not clearly articulated and accurate. You will also receive comments if you post something controversial like, blogging as a peer reviewed publication!
I’m afraid I can’t agree with her here, though. While it’s true that writing in a public forum allows people to critique your ideas and presentation (if anyone’s listening to what you’re saying in the first place), people read blogs differently than editors read papers. And part of why peer-reviewed papers are given such authority is because the review and vetting has happened before publication. Furthermore, reviewers and editors for peer-reviewed journals are (usually) considered experts in their fields, whereas any sort of review that happens in a blog is more crowdsourcing than expert opinion.
Bertolotti also doesn’t explicitly mention the more internal benefits of blogging. She does say that blogging allows you to demonstrate expertise in a particular area and to practice your writing, but even in the short time I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve found myself thinking about library issues I want to talk about in a much more organized fashion, deciding what relates to the topic, what examples and counter-examples I might use, and what isn’t related enough to be included in one post but might be the start of a new one. I’ve also been reading a lot more to find connections between ideas and am doing a better job of pulling in examples from sources that aren’t necessarily library-specific. Blogging has external benefits like the ones Bertolotti identifies, but it’s also something that has more internal benefits as well.
And just for fun, some tips from other library bloggers: last month, Creative Literacy offered five tips for better blogging. And earlier this week, GreenBeanTeenQueen celebrated its second anniversary; Sarah has five lessons on blogging and reviewing. She’s also running a contest with ARCs as prizes, so make sure you enter by the end of April.
March 19, 2010
One week from today I’ll be on a plane to Portland, Oregon for PLA2010! I’ve spent the last few days in a flurry of preparation: I’ve chosen my programs and sessions, I’ve made a list of what I need to pack, I’ve read the Walking Paper Guide to Portland, I’ve watched the Visiting Librarian’s Guide to Portland, and I’ve started to peruse the list of vendors.
I’m also very excited to announce that I’ll be guest blogging for the PLA Blog during the conference! I’ll be writing here, too, of course, but I’ll also post links here to what I write over there. About a month after the conference ends, I’ll mirror what I wrote for them here.
Finally, I’ll be tweeting throughout the conference; you can follow @librarified if you’re interested.
March 17, 2010
One month from today I’ll be headed to Portland for PLA’s 2010 National Conference! I’m really looking forward to more opportunities for professional development and meeting other cool librarians from around the country. In anticipation of PLA 2010, I thought I’d reflect on the highlights of my experience at ALA Annual 2009, which was the first conference I ever attended.
I was really lucky last year; it was my first year in the SLIS program and ALA was in Chicago, so I was able to attend at the student rate, not pay airfare, and not pay for a hotel (I have friends in Northwest Indiana so I stayed with them and took the train into town)–all of which made the conference affordable. And it was such a fantastic experience! By last summer my experience in actual libraries was pretty limited: most of what I knew I knew from class readings, homework, and discussion. Going to ALA showed me how much more libraries could be.
My first day, I attended YALSA’s Genre Galaxy, which covered different genres of YA lit: what makes them appealing, what books are out there, and how to sell them to teens or program around them. But the best part of this preconference were the authors who spoke to us about their work, including James Kennedy (whose appearance was all done in-character and involved local teens re-enacting a scene from his book–Elizabeth Bird of Fuse #8 did writeups and posted videos here, here, and here), Dom Testa, Simone Elkeles, David Lubar (whom I also got to speak with during a break–he’s such a cool dude!), Patrick Jones, Libba Bray, and Holly Black. Honestly, I was a little bit star-struck after a day of hearing these YA lit rockstars talk–and getting to talk to them one-on-one during breaks! The giddiness of being able to meet people whose work I enjoyed so much really impressed on me how great it’d be to be able to bring that experience to teens and children through author visits.
I also attended a bunch of sessions that blew me away with how incredibly awesome and proactive libraries could be. Scott Nicholson talked about gaming in libraries and did a great job explaining why gaming is good aside from just the way it brings kids into the library, and he explained the importance of being able to back up gaming in your library with your mission statement. Different librarians also talked about how they’d implemented gaming in their libraries–and it ranged from something as small as just having a teen-organized gaming collection in a tiny public library to a huge program with classes and guest speakers on how to create games at NYPL.
I also attended the panel discussion on Teen Advisory Boards and again had my mind blown (see my earlier post about my class presentation on TABs). The only Teen Advisory Board I’d seen in action was just a group of kids the librarian could bounce ideas off of. I’d never even considered how TABs could be harnessed to make a library better and give teens leadership opportunities, or how they could very nearly run a teen department with the right development work from the librarian. More than any other session, this panel discussion got me really excited about being able to work in a library and really make an impact with what I did there.
I sat in on a presentation on sex in YA literature that challenged notions we all have about teens and sexuality and the books they read. Laura Ruby‘s talk about writing for children and then writing for teens and having her books challenged gave interesting insight into the author’s side of things, and Marty Klein did a great job of putting things in a historical and psychological context and examining the state of teen sexuality and teen sex education today.
I also went to the panel discussion on graphic novels that included a representative from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Neil Gaiman, Terry Moore, and Craig Thompson. Again, it was interesting to hear from the creators of works that get challenged, works we feel we need to defend. The consensus seemed to be that they don’t set out to be controversial; they just write and draw the story they want to tell and it’s only after it’s been released that the work starts to get categorized and analyzed and challenged and loved. They also did a good job of making the point that just because it’s a graphic novel doesn’t mean it’s for children–and that’s something we need to keep in mind as librarians. I also enjoyed their conversation about how graphic novels differ from other media like film or text.
Beyond the sessions I attended (and there were more–those were just the ones that I found particularly inspiring or interesting), I had time to check out all of the vendors on the convention floor. I got some neat free stuff including books and bags and pins and a Polaroid of me hugging the Cat in the Hat and ARCs (see my earlier post on ARCs)–including one of CATCHING FIRE, which was fantastic and exciting. Especially since this was my first conference, this part really was overwhelming at times. There are just so many people and so many booths and so much stuff everywhere. I was shielded in part by not actually having any sort of purchasing power, and it did give me a good idea of what’s out there for when I am working in a library and go to conferences representing my institution.
Part of visiting vendors was being able to meet authors and illustrators and get signed copies of their books. I got to meet Mo Willems and tell him what a fan I was and have him sign a few books; I met E. Lockhart and briefly discussed Frankie’s mix of psychopath and awesome while she signed my copy of THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS (now out in paperback with a much more boring cover); and I not only met and received signed books from MT Anderson but was able to have a surprisingly long conversation with him. He turned out to be a super-nice guy and I really wish I’d been able to talk with him even longer. I also ran into Lori Ann Grover of readergirlz right before the Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet and had a chance to learn more about how she started readergirlz and all of the great things they’ve done so far.
And finally, I got to attend the Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet and the Michael L. Printz Award reception. The Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder event was so elegant and the acceptance speeches were moving and inspiring. I especially loved Ashley Bryan‘s story of growing up black and wanting to illustrate and his energetic, expressive group recitations of Langston Hughes’s poetry.
While the Printz reception was a more casual affair, it felt more personal, too. I enjoyed hearing from the honor books’ authors as well as the winner, and I especially liked the chance to mingle with the honorees afterward.
My first conference experience was a little bit overwhelming and exhausting (I really packed in every activity I could while I was there), but more than that it was incredibly inspiring and energizing. Through the sessions I attended and the people I met, I got to see what kinds of rockin’ awesome things librarians are doing. I came away from the experience feeling really excited about my profession and really motivated to learn more and do more.
So with PLA quickly approaching, I’m looking forward to being able to re-energize myself in my work, especially in a more focused framework since PLA will be about public libraries specifically, and I’m looking forward to everything I’ll learn and be inspired by and inspired to do. The one way in which I felt like my ALA experience was lacking was that I didn’t get to meet as many new people as I wanted, and I’m hoping to do that at PLA–in just one month!
February 24, 2010
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