Inspiration Found: iSchool Student Conference

One of the great things about the Faculty of Information is that it houses an amazingly interdisciplinary group of students. We come from all kinds of different academic disciplines and bring a breadth of experiences, knowledge, and interests to our new field of information studies. Our professors like to remind us of this and tell us——especially when they are trying to sell us on the benefits of yet another group project——that we learn most from each other. It just might be true.

This past weekend, the point was driven home for me at the second annual iSchool student conference at Faculty of Information. The Saturday morning session "Seeking and Finding" was particularly great thanks to papers from U of T students Amanda LeClerc (Accessing Inspiration) and Marie-Eve Belanger (Annotation as Scholarly Primitive: Traces of Information Access). The papers crossed the boundaries of art, information studies, and ethnography, too. Not to mention inspiration.

The program is still up. Go see what you missed.

http://ia3cconference.ischool.utoronto.ca/

Fieldnotes from Library School

I was finally inspired to start this blog today. This inspiration came from a lecture given last evening by Dr. Nancy Foster, Director of Anthropological Research for the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries, at the University of Toronto.

The lecture, entitled "Why do Students Want to be in the Library if They are Not Using the Books?", discussed the use of ethnographic methods to better understand (and respond to the needs of) library users at the University of Rochester. In her conclusion, Dr. Foster suggested that the answer to the question posed in the title of her talk has to do, in part, with being in the presence of the physical records of inquiry and achievement of scholarly disciplines. Perhaps what appealed to me most about her conclusion was the acknowledgment that the web of relationships between students, books, physical libraries, and the world of digital information is a complex one. One that increasingly is becoming the subject of ethnographic methods of examination. I agree, enthusiastically, that ethnographic methods have a lot to contribute to research and practice in Library and Information Studies (LIS).

I hope to explore some of these contributions, among other topics, in this blog. Primarily, however, I will document and reflect on my own experience as a Master of Information student in the Faculty of Information. The program, institution, faculty, students, courses, and all the other stuff will shape my approach to understanding libraries, library users, and LIS professionals. In that sense, these fieldnotes will document the making of a librarian.