IST 511 – Day 5

07/26/2009 Leave a comment

This was hand-crafted in JFK on Saturday, but the WiFi in my wing did not work so well. Here we go!

So Friday was our poster session, which we did in the style of a conference poster session. Lots of topics, lots of people passing through with passing curiosity. Our main focus was to tackle a topic that is contentious for librarians – there are plenty of controversies on which librarians agree for the most part, after all. You can find Harry Potter on the shelves, right?

Our poster began as a search into controversial forms of funding libraries. After all, the American Library Association is against charging fees of any kind – to the point of being against overdue fines. Charging for services discriminates against those who cannot pay, and discourages those who can. Or so goes the argument. So what did we find? Read more of this post

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IST 511 – Day 4

07/23/2009 Leave a comment

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

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IST 511 intermission

07/23/2009 Leave a comment

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

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IST 511 – Day 3

07/23/2009 Leave a comment

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

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IST 511 – Day 2

07/22/2009 Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s all about how you present something. That is what today was about – between looking at the complexities of searching, copyright law, and the presentation from a couple of librarian/information architects from Razorfish. (Neat website by the way!) Read more of this post

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