"Leaving" librarianship
I recently found out that I have been accepted into a PhD program. This is something I've been working towards for a while and I am extremely excited! But, the reality of what I'm getting myself into is slowly starting to dawn on me. I'm not afraid of the time commitment, the stress, the pressure, or even the reality that I will now bore my friends to death with endless ramblings about my topic and its progress. The reality that has me most concerned is that I might not have the time to remain as "kept up" as I'd like to be. Even though I'll be studying libraries and librarians, my area of study is just a small corner of the LIS world and I know many, many things will go unnoticed by me.
There are so many topics that are written about everyday by bloggers, friends on Facebook, various LIS twitter feeds, etc. that impact our work everyday. And, it's hard enough to stay up-to-date when you're working as a librarian. I used to always have a pile of articles and URLs that I promised myself I'd read on one of those elusive "rainy days." What will happen now that my "everyday" work will involve the "rarefied" (okay, not really) world of academe? During my MLIS I had a huge Bloglines account with what felt like a 1000 feeds. I guess I'll have to go back to that and make time to read it. LISNews is coming out with its Top Ten Blogs to read in 2010 list soon, I guess I'll have to dust off the old Bloglines account!
How do you guys "keep up?"
posted by Deborah @ 8:41 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Google Reader. I feel lost if I don't read my rss feeds everyday!
Congrats on your acceptance into a doctoral program!! I started my program (in higher ed) three years ago as a part-time student (finishing my last course this semester and beginning to think about the dissertation now). You won't necessarily fall behind in keeping up, depending upon what your course load will be. I think using Bloglines is a great way to plan to keep up--that is my strategy and it works for the most part (although I'm sure there are things that I am missing in the Twitter universe due to lack of time). I honestly do not think I would be keeping up any better if I was not in a program!
I'm a big hypocrite for saying this, but I don't think filling your aggregator with 1000 feeds is the best way to go. It's better to be selective and pick the ones that have the most value for keeping you up to date (not on the nitty-gritty level, but the more global level).
Browsing through magazines and "lighter" journals from time to time is also a great way to find out what people are doing and writing about (maybe stuff like RUSQ—Reference & User Services Quarterly and College & Research Libraries News).
And of course: conferences! You can balance the scholarly and practitioner conferences to make sure you don't lose either perspective.
This will out me as the "user" that I am (in the bad sense of the word), but I've come to rely mostly on items that my Google.Reader.Friends share with me. Alongside items that come my way through Twitter, I've found this social-aspect of RSS feeds to be a fairly reliable way to help me find the diamond in the rough (or let it find me, so to speak).
But that's the thing - when I'm reading items in my RSS reader, I'm happy to discover that diamond in the rough - there's an element of chance and surprise to it, which puts smiles on our faces. However, to really "keep up", especially from an academic POV, I use strict search alerts from various DBs to alert me to items of interest in my field.
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