IST 511 – Day 4

Today we talked about library physical space and event programming; professional organizations, ethics, and professionalism; and of course about our poster project. The poster project is done (yay) and really, the lesson of everything, even wider than anything the professional organizations might say, is the basic theory of library science: Ranganathan’s “Five Laws of Library Science:” Read more of this post

IST 511 intermission

Cue Monty Python music!

So, we watched this in class:

Now, we’re participating in their next video: Library 101. Read more of this post

IST 511 – Day 3

Maybe the top lesson from today for me was that customers don’t want mediated services, they want to do it themselves.

This is not actually new at all to me. I see it at The Bank all the time; how many people do we see when the ATM goes down? (Answer: a lot who seem very confused).

Even working in a library, as a page; we were instructed that we needed to get people to talk to a librarian, because effectively we weren’t getting paid enough to deal with the public (this is what we were told). Sometimes we would say to ask a librarian, and you would see someone look defeated. Kind of a sad, “no, I’ll go find it on my own…” Read more of this post

IST 511 – Day 1

So day one of class went well, let’s go with a couple of highlights!

    • The speakers had done some really influential and amazing things. One of them especially, who helped start the first literacy listserve! From there, and with its success, she ended up testifying before Congress that the internet was an excellent tool for learning, and now we have libraries wired across the country.
    • We started a group project, which may lead to us being funded to take our poster presentation to next year’s ALA conference! Motivation and competition, here we go!… Good group, great ideas, we’re hoping we get to move forward with our first choice today.

Speaking of today, I’d better go get some coffee and get to class!