I’m going to be attending University of Washington’s Information School (aka iSchool) to get my MLIS! Strangely, they haven’t asked for a deposit yet, even though they’ve confirmed my acceptance – wonder what’s up with that.
There are a few LIS-related things I’ve been thinking about recently:
- When the work server was down last week I went through the Library of Congress’s MARC tutorial and was surprised at how much less difficult MARC records were to understand than I thought they would be. In fact, I got so engrossed in reading the tutorial and compiling a few pages of notes for future reference that I ended up staying up past my bedtime and was quite tired the next morning. This is undoubtedly a good sign for my future as a librarian. ;)
- A few days ago I volunteered for the first time at the Visual Resources Collection for the Oregon Folk Arts scanning project. We had originally intended for me to help scan at high resolution the images from folklore field research in the 1960s and 70s, but it quickly became obvious that I would be more help in correcting the color and contrast of the images already scanned. This takes longer than I had realized, because the images are scanned at such high resolution that they’re about 60-70 MB each, but it’s fun. I’m doing what I’m good at – making pictures prettier in Photoshop – and it’s satisfying in a way I’ve never experienced before to use that skill. It’s hardly the most challenging work, but this must be something like what people who really know and enjoy what they’re doing feel like when they’re working.
- Speaking of work, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of LIS. I’m a Title Quality Assurance (QA) Agent for Demand Media. Essentially what I’m doing is making decisions about whether the quality of information is good enough to be useful, if it can be edited into a useful state, or if it it should be rejected because of low quality or nonadherence to company guidelines. I need to think about this some more, but it seems like there are some strong parallels with library work that can be useful in getting a LIS job.
I’ve also continued to read about library science and it seems that the more I read, the more bogged down I get in making notes of what I’ll need to know. I know I’ll learn much of this in my MLIS, but it’s still both intriguing and troubling to know that the field is so broad and deep. I feel like I should be checking out books on what to do with an MLIS and how to do interviews and so on, but honestly it’s a bit too intimidating at this point. Better to avoid freaking myself out until I have to look for a LIS job.
