First off, I just want to say that as of yesterday I am the proud driver of a stack cart in the 14.8 million volume Robarts Library, which is right beside my faculty. This is not the reference desk position I almost got at the beginning of September, but hopefully it is a step in the right direction. Also, one day a week I will help with selecting books to send to the uptown storage facility. Not the most glamourous position, but I will be working less hours, so that is good, and I can hopefully make some good contacts.
Which brings me to the topic of a good book I am reading, Spanning the Theory-Practice Divide in Library & Information Science by Bill Crowley. I’ve only got through the first chapter, but this is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while. He outlines the three historical conceptions of whatever it is that I am studying here, “library studies”, “library and information science” and “information studies.”
I find myself unsure of this divide myself, and it seems that often on different days I feel like I am engaged in different things. Somedays I feel like am highly engaged with learning about being a service professional, other days I feel like I all could do forever is learn about the science-like mechanics of the profession, like classification schemes, the nature of citation indexes and general other Ranganathan- and Garfield-like subjects.
Yet often I feel like, particularly given the Internet and the information economy, I have to look at information in all its contexts, social, political, cultural, technological etc, and I feel more like the actual name of my degree, one who studies information.
Furthermore, I think that my department itself has some of this multiple personality disorder. As noted above, the name of the faculty is “Information Studies,” we are explicitly an “I-School,” and our dean is a philosopher/cognitive scientist who is teaching a course on the philosophy of information. At the same time the vast majority of my classes are not so academic in nature, straddling the divide between “library professional” and “library science” topics.
I feel disoriented here, and not because I am not doing well, on the contrary I am doing exceptionally well. The problem is that I have all these paths in front of me and I feel like I really can’t choose. Nor can I even decide if there even has to be a choice, or will some kind of conglomeration work itself out in the end.
I know for sure that what I came here to study I am no longer really interested in or I am not interested in the ways I thought I was going to be. Where to go from here is the next big question.
You know, the more classes I take the less I know why I started this program as well. And I’m doing splendidly. There’s the rub …finding out with each new insight that my ignorance also grows in direct proportion to the knowledge I gain. I’m thinking organization of information concentration. But that could change tomorrow. Cheers
February 14th, 2007, at 7:00 pm #I am loving my Knowledge Organization course right now. Just learned about the Classification Research Group (CRC).
I don’t know if I really am questioning things. In fact, I really enjoy it here, and am considering staying to do more research if I can find something to write about. It is really more that I have these great classes where I am challenged quite a bit, but then I have classes like this Online Information Retrieval course which really could have been taught in two afternoon workshops, not 4 months and a ten page paper.
Really, it is in the way of other things I would like to study, other classes I would rather be taking.
February 15th, 2007, at 10:39 pm #