I enjoy when students talk about their courses. I find that each department approaches the dicipline and professional practice in such different ways.
Just picked my courses:
FIS2127H – Collection, Development, Evaluation and Management
FIS2172H – Readers’ Advisory:Reference Work and Resource
FIS2300H – Special Topics: Information Literacy
FIS2199H – Special Topics in Info. Studies: Advocacy and Library Issues (no direct link, at bottom)
This last one is by distance–my first distance class–and I heard is amazing. It is with the ex-President of the Canadian Library Association, who gave a talk last year. I am also very excited by Information Literacy and Collection Development…. and even Readers’ Advisory, even though I am not really interested in public library work.
Next semester:
FIS2131H – The Literature of the Humanities and Social Sciences
FIS2181H – Information Policy
These two I want for sure. Not so sure about:
FIS2137H – International Organizations: Their Documents and Publications
FIS2132H – The Literature of Science and Technology
or
FIS2125H – Information and Culture in a Global Context (links on this page are really broken)
I have signed up for Science and Technology for now, but I don’t know if I am more interested in professional courses or theory courses this time around. And, frankly, the selection this year was not very fruitful.
This is a dual reply to both Librarian in Black and Library Garden. Both question how professionals can still seem to hold on to old practices in the face of “Library 2.0″ to hold an “unwillingness to take on anything new“.
A quote from Library Garden:
But how did we get to this stage? Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements? How did we reach a point where the patrons’ needs were less important than the traditional way of doing things?
All along, the job of a reference librarian has been to find the information patrons need. We are in the business of connecting people to the information they require… so why care about the format that information is found in?
My reply brings up a lot of issues I have been realizing about Library 2.0 and librarianship in general.
Of course we should always keep up with the times. Librarians have always been seen as the avant-garde of information technology (even beginning with the codex).
I think the real danger is to see technology as the complete solution. Patrons not coming to the library: must be because there is no Flickr group. Reference service stats down: must be because IM reference is so horrible, or non existent. Teenagers choosing Google over books: we need a Second Life presence.
There is a problem in society and culture right now where people choose cheap and easy information satisfactions over long, difficult but ultimately more enriching ones. True, we should use technology to fulfil the later, but it is not going to do the work for us, nor solve all of our problems.
Sometimes people just can’t have it cheap and easy. And the library has to keep promoting the hard and rewarding path and instruct (gasp!) patrons as to why that path is rewarding.
