drewsnews

I began the GSLIS program with the idea that I was not going to be a “traditional librarian type.” Though the idea, of working to help others interested in knowledge, appealed to me, I felt that the typical library environment as I’d known it had gotten a little stale and needed some changes. I also had an idea that libraries needed to adjust to serve the needs of increasingly media-diverse communities. L2 naturally appealed to me when I first read about it in a Casey article for 701. For open assignments, I chose to read articles on L2 and wrote my management paper on innovation, citing several L2 articles.

I was set on taking this class after reading about it in the Course Descriptions manual, and took LIS753 mainly because it was a prerequisite (that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy LIS753; that class was terrific, too). My attitude on the first day of LIS768 was “Finally, here we go!” It felt as if the pace of my LIS education picked up, seeing on the slides all the different ways that L2 can manifest itself. Pursuing answers to the question “What can we do to better reach new patrons while improving our service to our current patron base?” for the entire semester made it go by quickly.

It’s also exciting when my task involves keeping aware of any new developments in information technology and then trying to find uses for them. This gives me the opportunity to exercise my creativity (however lacking it may be), and I can enthusiastically pursue new methods of carrying out tasks in the hopes of contributing something new and useful to society and to the profession. This was the impetus for my Twitter networking – searching for trail-blazers in library science and other professions and following their Tweets to see what they recommend. I’m looking forward to attending library conferences in the future and maybe running into some of these Tweeps, (and, of course, my LIS768 classmates)!