Salutations!
Among the myriad of important things I gleaned from INFO 5000: Introduction to Information Professions in Fall 2022, the top 3 things are as follows. I really felt like I had grown so much both academically and and professionally in my understanding of LIS during this course.
- I found a sense of purpose in Rubin and Rubin’s (2020) detailed discussion of the library’s basic organizational structure (p. 71), since it highlights the vastness of the profession I’ve chosen to enter. The organization, broken into three categories of User services, Technical services, and Support services (Rubin & Rubin, p. 71) which, regardless of type of library being analyzed, provide numerous employment opportunities for many different individuals, whether or not they are in the field of librarianship, such as IT, HR, and personnel facilities maintenance, and security (pp. 76-77). Libraries can be highly important in the communities they serve, beyond merely the patrons and librarians who interact around materials.
- I found a sense of peace on all the different types of libraries expounded upon in the textbook, since it helped me over some of my guilty feelings from my choice to switch decidedly from the role of school library media specialist to anything else library-related when beginning this MSLIS program this past January [of 2022]. I now see more clearly and firmly that the switch has nothing to do with my supposed “failure” in one realm of library, as I wrongly thought; rather, it is my adventurous nature and the ability to see all the open doors this degree will offer that I want to try out in my professional life; there are so many different types of libraries and different roles within those organizations that it will become merely a question of what do I want to do for the present season, not “here’s what I am duty-bound to do for the rest of my career, whether I love it or not.”
- I found a sense of professionalism through the coursework that helped me grow in my evaluative skills when it comes to scholarly sources and forced me to think about aspects of librarianship as a profession that I had previously considered; before this class, neither I had considered what impact one important LIS figure can have on today’s practices, nor had I even thought about the various men and women responsible for great strides in our profession, often by merely doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and becoming famous in the process inadvertently. As Shakespeare (1601/1988) penned in Twelfth Night, “ ‘Be not afraid of greatness’– ’twas well writ. / ‘Some are born great’ – / ‘Some achieve greatness’ – / ‘And some have greatness thrust upon them.’ ” (3.4.37, 39, 41, 43).
RLGing,
Sarah Hope
References:
Rubin, R. E. & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.
Shakespeare, W. (1601/1988). Twelfth night, or what you will. (S. Wells & G. Taylor, Eds.). (Compact Edition). (Original work published 1601)