library school bloggers

Blogs by LIS students and new professionals

Graham Lavender 10 Comments

Jason Puckett has compiled a nice list of blogs written by new LIS professionals and students (which includes the ILSS – thanks, Jason!) I’ve mentioned a number of these already, and indeed, some are written by my classmates, and they are all worth checking out:

I didn’t actually realize how many I was subscribing to until I went to compose this post. Some of these I’ve been reading for months or years, and some I just added last week. My “New Librarians” subscription folder consists of:

heidi go seek
informing MUVEs
The Inspired Library School Student
Into the Stacks
Jan Dawson, 7/8 librarian
Life as I Know It
New Librarians Blog
nirak.net – Musings of an LIS Student
The Vital Library
What I Learned Today…

Tagging

Graham Lavender 6 Comments

In library school, we learn about LC subject headings and other structured, formalized ways of categorizing information. This is important, and no one is arguing that we should give up on subject headings altogether, but I think librarians need to at least understand the way users are organizing their own information. Tagging, exemplified by social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, allows users to create their own labels and then compare them to the labels that others have used.

Library school student Kirsten of Into the Stacks has some interesting thoughts about tagging:

When I browse through the bookmarks in my network, I use the tags to help decide whether it’s something in which I’m interested. Since site titles can be misleading or uninformative, and most people do not regularly add user notes for their bookmarks, tags are often the only way I have of judging the usefulness of a site without clicking through.