Week 1: Introduction

Hi all,

I am also in my second and final year of the LIS concentration, and, like many of my fellow blog posters, wanted to take some courses in my last semester that a) I would find enjoyable and engaging but b) would be challenging and push me beyond my comfort zone. I did my Bachelor's and first Master's degree in English Literature and have certainly been a bibliophile and fierce defender of the printed book. My mother actually hid her Kindle from me for the first two months she owned it, allegedly fearing my snobbery and wrath. I feel like studying literature in the conventional sense tends to privilege the printed text over the digital, but, like my blog-mate, Julia, noted in her introduction, I liked the first week's readings emphasis on the importance of privileging neither the printed nor the digital text over the other. I feel this is a concept that I luckily grew to accept when I was in the Book History and Print Culture collaborative program during my English MA, and it is actually one of the things that made me want to come to the iSchool and explore modern librarianship. I think that moving away from the idea that knowledge and information is best contained in a book and accepting that information can be effectively delivered and stored in many ways is key to combating the argument that librarianship will ostensibly become obsolete along with the printed word. If we are currently living in the information age then surely it should also be the age of the information professional, from those of us in LIS to ARM to KMIM and so on. 

Anyway that was perhaps a lot of rambling to say that I am thrilled to be in this class and to have my ideas and values challenged by the lively debates that I have already glimpsed in my classmates' in-class and in-blog introductions.