TNQ E-Exclusive
Nicole Dixon - Confessions of a Reluctant Information Manager: My First Semester of Library School
Actually, it’s not called library school anymore. I learned that my first day. This September, two months before turning thirty-five, I returned to university for my fourth degree: a Master of Library and Information Studies, or MLIS. But try uttering that mouthful to your grandma or the lady at the post office in the fishing village you call home. Even if you tell them you’re studying to become a librarian, they still think you’re spending an awful lot of time and money to learn how to shelve books.
Librarian? Books? Ha! “If you’re here hoping you’ll eventually read books to children, you’re mistaken,” our Director explained during one of our many orientation sessions. Which was fine by me. I’d just spent the last ten years of my life reading books to children. As I said when I stood up to introduce myself to the other first year students, “I’ve been a teacher for ten years and I have to be honest: students literally stink.”
As a reader of TNQ, you probably have favourite library moments. Mine include spending childhood Saturdays with my father at the Sarnia public library and listening to an LP of Kerouac’s “American Haikus” at York’s Sound and Moving Image Library one dreary, lonely Sunday during the first year of my BAH. I wrote the stories for my MA portfolio on the fifth floor of Toronto’s Reference Library and discovered Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman in Advocate Harbour’s tiny library branch. I love books (and archives and maps and audiobooks, and, heck, even online databases) and so do many of my fellow students. Yet I’ve spent the last four months learning more about systems thinking, metadata*, networking, and “managing with integrity” than I’ve spent actually touching books inside any library, because this isn’t library school and we’re no longer future librarians. In another year and a half I’ll be a newly-minted information manager ready to begin my career as an information professional. Nicole Dixon, BAH, BEd, MA, MLIS. Four degrees of loan applications.
Speaking of acronyms, my ALA-accredited MLIS, part of SIM in the FoM at Dal, where I take INFO and MGMT classes such as MWB to learn about DC, LoC SHs, KM, CSR, and SLAs, all in hopes of getting a CLA job, maybe with the CRL or at Mt. A, is one of the most acronym- and abbreviation-heavy fields I’ve encountered. Though a lot of it’s BS, especially the BLS, I thoroughly enjoyed INFO 5500, despite the reliance on PPTs, and have met some great people, a couple of whom I now consider BFFs.
And now for a lesson in buzzwords, brought to you by MWB. MWB stands for “Management without Borders,” and if you just threw up in your mouth at this inappropriate appropriation of Doctors without Borders, that was my reaction too. MWB is FoM (the Faculty of Management)’s flagship graduate course, and every first-year graduate management student, whether potentially managing a business, government ministry, marine resource, or information, must take this course. And, oh, the buzzwords and phrases, oh the PowerPoints. We actually had a PowerPoint presentation on how to make PowerPoint presentations!
The MWB Buzzword Dictionary
- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). n. Ensuring a nicer, greener, more sustainable corporation. You know, like how Shell claims in TV commercials to care about the environment while ripping up Alberta’s crust for bitumen.
- Deliverables. n. Work you submit for grading. Formerly known as “assignments.”
- The Elevator Pitch. n. Selling yourself to a potential employer in five floors or less: If I’d been less lazy and taken the stairs, I wouldn’t be able to deliver this elevator pitch!
- Group Work. n. Whatever it is, it deserves to be taken out back and shot before it further lowers your GPA, your morale and your view of humanity.
- The Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building. n. The newly-built, naturally-lit, thoroughly-wired cathedral to management (with the “potential for ‘green roof’ development”!) named after weapons manufacturer Kenneth C. Rowe: Rowe Rowe Rowe your bomb, gently out the hatch…
- Network. v. It’s all about what you can do for them: Hi, I’m Nicole Dixon, MLIS candidate. Now that we’ve networked, can I get an extra drink ticket?
- PESTe Analysis. n. An MWB deliverable (see above). I got a B+ on my PESTe analysis, or really, “Nancy” got a B+ on her PESTe analysis ‘cause my prof still doesn’t know my name. And it’s December.
- Plenary. n. Lecture from another climate change denier: I’m too hungover to attend Friday’s plenary. I mean, it’s not like they take attendance.
- Systems Thinking. n. Promoting synergy. Like a boss.
Don’t get me wrong. I love school. Well, I love learning. Sure I’m fed up with teaching, but I wouldn’t have spent almost all of my life, either as a student or teacher, in school if I didn’t love it. I shouldn’t be surprised that this has been my most conformist degree. I’ve done two for love (my MA and BAH, both in creative writing), and now two (including the BEd) for money. I just thought, you know, it being library school, there’d be a little more attention to libraries. And books. But it’s not library school. That’s what I learned my first day.
I also learned, that, yikes, I’m kinda old. Reader, if you’re over thirty-five, you may be laughing through your tears right now, but if you too sat in a class filled with Gen Yers and their techno doodads (they text and IM and update their Facebook statuses! in class!), if you heard them exclaim they were in grade four when Beck’s Mellow Gold was released as they start (not finish) drinking at eleven p.m., you’d feel old too. As a member of Gen X, I’m a digital migrant, familiar with both analog and digital worlds. Yet looking around at all my wrinkle-free colleagues, their non-white hair, their ironic rubber boots, well, it gives me the incentive to bike to school even on the coldest days.
Clearly, I survived my first semester of library school my MLIS. I know it’ll get better. Soon I’ll be designing electronic texts and proposing ideas for a thesis (a climate change contingency plan for information professionals? a digital archive of Cumberland County’s shipping industry?). Until then, while I have a few weeks (thankfully!) off of school, I’ve got a novel to write and some wood to bring in. I’ll try to resist updating my website metadata or better organizing my books, but I do keep running my hands along their spines. Oh, books, how I’ve missed you. Please forgive my hierarchical taxonomies, my metadata schemes.
