I posted a rather long comment to this post at Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective. It is a list of Library 2.0 skills they should be teaching in MLIS degrees. Given my current thoughts about my schooling, my comment I thought was appropriate:
I am currently in my first term of an Master’s of Information Studies, and while agree with a lot of what you have mentioned, I have been bemoaning the lack of rigor and intellectual engagement in my classes.
While I agree somewhat with what you have listed, was not the degree conceived as Library Science? Many of the things you have mentioned, at least in terms of having to teach or learn them, could be picked up with a few hours of an O’Reilly book. Am I paying thousands of dollars to evaluate URLs?
I came here after a year off reading about various theoretically works concerning the science of librarianship, and I am not discussing any of it. Ok, maybe I am too Library 1.0, but are not theories of classification, bibliographic control etc etc worth anything anymore?
Want to be 2.0? Can we judge folksonomies without having a solid foundation in taxonomy? Can we judge social networking without a solid theoretical basis in ideas at the confrontation of information and society? Is it sufficient to just create a web page, or do we need to ask what a web page means?
I know you are not suggesting what you have listed is just what we should be learning, but there are a lot of scholarly voices who sell librarians short because at their schools they learn about URLs, RSS and Wikis
[...] What do we want from our LIS education? Laura Cohen has a list of suggested skills, which she calls foundations skills, for LIS programs in today’s world of Library 2.0. I like the list - think that most of the items are extremely important for people to have a handle on in order to be successful at librarianship. In response, Steven Chabot, from Subject/Object, posts an interesting comment. In the comment (available on his blog also), Steven writes: “While I agree somewhat with what you have listed, was not the degree conceived as Library Science? Many of the things you have mentioned, at least in terms of having to teach or learn them, could be picked up with a few hours of an O’Reilly book. Am I paying thousands of dollars to evaluate URLs?” [...]
October 18th, 2006, at 8:14 pm #[...] I have been sometimes questioning the difficulty of my classes in a few posts, and the nature of the program, but I take it back now. I have this great class right now, FIS2142 Theories of Knowledge Organization AKA Classification. [...]
January 20th, 2007, at 2:59 pm #