Winter quarter overview
My classes this quarter are Information Resources & Services II and Professional and Social Aspects of Information Services. I’d heard good things about the latter last term, and now I see why. The professor uses the mildly terrifying pedagogical device of randomly choosing four class members to stand up and talk for a few minutes about their responses to the readings, which means that everyone comes in prepared. (Why didn’t I ever think to do that when I was teaching? It would have spared us so many lackluster discussions.) But the readings, praise the powers above, are really interesting, and he’s also having us role-play what we would do in various real-world scenarios, like being asked by the police to hand over patron records. We started off talking about professional ethics for librarians — a good place to start — and next week’s topic is copyright, which is something I definitely need to learn more about. Plus, we’re going to be learning to write a grant proposal, another much-needed bit of knowledge.
Info Resources & Services II is the sequel to the course I took last term in which we learned more about Dialog than we’ll probably ever use again; this course is less narrowly focused on searching, and gets into the (for me) much more interesting topic of models of people’s information behavior, including the totally quotidian types of information-seeking we do when we try to find out what the weather’s going to be like tomorrow, or what kind of new car to buy, or where’s a good place to take guitar lessons. One of the assignments is a visit to a local library; I’m going to see if I can use this as an excuse to go visit the Rosenbach Museum and Library and gaze awestruck at the papers of Marianne Moore. And we’re going to read Vannevar Bush’s classic essay "As We May Think." I was inordinately happy to see that on the syllabus.
So, yes: it’ll be a good quarter. No more goofing off and reading frivolous non-class-related stuff on my train commute, but that’s all right.
That essay looks fascinating; thank you for the link!
Your classes sound like fun. Although I am not a librarian, I always wanted to take some high-powered course in, basically, how to look stuff up. I love researching things. I look up lots of stuff because I work as a journalist.