I. Intro
I finished my last assignment for my Master’s in Library Science today. Or, more accurately, the a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science (MS/LIS) to the folks at the University of Illinois. Oh hey, look at that. I spelled “Illinois” correctly. Glad I got there eventually.
If I could do it all again, I would probably have picked the same program, but taken different classes. Here’s the breakdown of my classes along an axis measuring how professionally useful that class is and how much I actually learned in that class
My situation is sort of unique, in that although I’m a librarian, the majority of what I do is reference. While knowledge about the library generally is certainly invaluable, nearly everything I absolutely need to know, I can and mostly have, learned on the job. What’s the point of requiring a library science degree for my program? Honestly, no idea. There’s a wide recognition that it’s a gatekeeping degree, since the position also requires a JD. I think the JD is much more crucial to being a law librarian than any version of an MLS for reference. Furthermore, if anyone has a JD, chances are they are likely a quick enough study to pick up the MLS material that would actually benefit them without much trouble.
With that mindset, I decided that I’d prioritize classes that were interesting and fun rather than classes that would help me in my job, which explains the spread of classes outlined here.
II. First Semester
My first semester’s classes were
- Information Organization and Access
- Libraries, Information, and Societies
- The Book as a Physical Object
Numbers 1 and 2 were the only required classes in the program at UIUC. I think since they know that students will end up in a wide variety of employment situations, mandating too many courses wouldn’t be the most helpful thing, allowing for flexibility in students being able to choose their own curriculum. I really like that approach.
Information Organization and Access
Information Organization and Access was a good intro to library science as a science, which I was unfamiliar with up to that point, but that’s about it. I did a lot of readings which helped me learn about the field and speak library-ese, but that’s about it. It’s pretty middle in utility, and pretty middle in actual learning.
Libraries, Information, and Society
Libraries, Information, and Society was a much more interesting course for me. I learned about the social impact of libraries, as well as perspectives on societies that libraries are invested in and promote. I think I overall appreciated this course more, and rank it higher in actual learning. However, Law Libraries tend to occupy a different social role than public libraries do, which is what this class was primarily focused on, so not that high in utility. There was briefly a weird incident though, where I had gotten full points on every assignment except the final one, and I looked at the feedback from the instructor as to why. She said that my citations in my bibliography weren’t alphabetized. This was very annoying. Since she had required a citation form I was unfamiliar with (APA or something??) , I had made sure to finish he assignment early, then set a special appointment with a graduate teaching assistant to look over the citations. She pointed out some things to change, which I did, but not that the bibliography would have to be alphabetized. Then in my professor’s feedback she said something like “bibliography is not alphabetized, as is standard in most citation styles.” Well, not in bluebook!
This class was also pretty work-heavy. Not just weekly reading assignments, but also Canvas blog posts, in the infamous “Write a post and respond to two other people” situation. I particularly hate this, because it punishes the students who post first, since they have to return to the page later to write responses, since there were insufficient posts to respond to when they initially posted.
Book as a Physical Object
My fun class for that semester was the Book as a Physical Object. While I do handle books on a daily basis at work, their history is largely irrelevant to me, and we have librarians in technical services who are much more knowledgeable and adept at maintaining our stacks. If we did have any more historical books to look after, we also have a rare books librarian as well as an archivist who specialize in these things. Regardless, I find books very interesting, and definitely learned a lot. One thing, however, is that the professor is quite bad at dealing with technology, and is not at all understanding or sympathetic about it. The first class he had really big connectivity issues, and made it our problem by running each subsequent class over by 20 to 30 minutes. Even after an email to the dean, who reprimanded him, he continued to do it “since the course was so close to being done anyway.” The irony is also not lost on me that I took an on-line course on the book as a physical object. It was a limitation that we addressed repeatedly.
I got to write a very interesting paper about Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, arguing that what the play morally addresses and condemns is not just forbidden knowledge itself, but rather books, as an emergent technology, which was seen as a new and rampant vehicle of such knowledge. In his feedback, the professor told me that he used to each a non-Shakespeare renaissance literature course which covered Faustus, and that even though he tried to lead them to it, his students routinely failed to recognize the point that my paper made. That was nice of him. However, he was very particular about the formal elements. I’m not familiar with Chicago-style citations, which he required. I used “Ibid” a few times, and his feedback said how antiquated such a practice was, and how no one uses ibid anymore. Joke’s on him. Bluebook uses ibid extensively.
III. Second Semester
Semester 2’s classes
1. Government Information
2. Theological Librarianship
3. Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management
4. Foundations of Information Processing
Government Information
This was the single class that I thought would the the most informative and useful for me. I wasn’t very correct, while a lot of the information was relevant, it was stuff I had already learned on the job. I had done a few assignments with our government documents collection and our gov docs librarian, and I had done a lot of independent research and on-the-job learning. Oh, and also I had gotten a law degree. A lot of the government, as it turns out, either sues or gets sued. To read and understand those cases, you have to know enough about the gov entities. So although the topic covered was very useful, I did not learn very much from the course. My chart positioning reflects this.
I remember, also, that I was part of a project at work to process some catalogue records for our government documents collection, since my library is a federal depository. I thought to myself “Hey, I know, I’m in this handy class. I’ll just refer to my textbook to see if it can help me with this problem.” The textbook section on my particular topic at hand, however, was pretty cursory, and after a brief overview said something to the effect of “If you have any further questions, contact the librarians at your local federal depository library.” But… what if I AM the librarian at the federal depository library???
This class was also very nit-picky. Weekly assignments out of the textbook, which was already quite outdated. A lot of agency pages had changed, so the step-by-step instructions were of negative help.
One fun thing about this class is that after he spoke to our class, I got to add the Superintendent of Documents on LinkedIn.
Theological Librarianship
My fun class for this semester. I’m of split opinions about it. On one hand, the topic, readings, and subject are very interesting. On the other hand, this class felt like death by a thousand cuts. If other busy-work classes required weekly blog posts or a submitted written assignment, this class had maybe 3x as much work. Pretty much every week you’d have to do a reference exercise, write a blog post with takeaways from the last class, write responses to your peers, find an article on a subject, read the article, write a summary of the article, and a few times throughout the semester, read a whole book and review it. Oh, and even though a lot of these assignments happen weekly, they ALL HAD A DIFFERENT DEADLINE. Like one week the reference exercise would be due Sunday, another day, it would be due Monday. Then maybe the article review would be due Friday, etc. Just insanity. To make matters worse, it’s clear that the Canvas modules were just copied from year to year that the instructor taught the course in the Spring, since often, the title of the module would have a due date, but then the due date coded for the actual exercise in Canvas would have a different date. I understand that, especially for online courses, engagement is hard, and having a weekly type of assignment is helpful for instructors to make sure students are continuing to follow along since it might be the only way to get tangible input from a lot of them. However, I think this class has way too much nit-picky work for a graduate program. People got families and jobs, and if they’re not going to put work in, then they wouldn’t be in grad school to begin with.
Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management
This class was sort of a shot in the dark. To be honest, I picked the class because the title and description sounded fun. Little did I know that it was mostly for MSIS (Master of Science in Information Science) students who wanted to do things like work for corporations doing like data warehousing and (hopefully ethical) intelligence-gathering. This class was definitely informative, but it just really didn’t have anything to do with what I was going to school for. But I really liked this instructor. He was very friendly and knowledgeable, and just a super chill guy. I’d be friends with him, but if I could do iSchool again, would not take his class. A good portion of the course was working in teams to generate a report for a corporation to meet their knowledge management needs, and the corporation happened to be John Deere. We were assigned their construction division, so I currently know a uselessly large amount about the market position, economic practices, and equipment of Deere and their main competitors in construction equipment.
Fundamentals of Information Processing
Of all the classes this semester, I can concretely say that the class with the biggest impact on me both personally and professionally, was Fundamentals of Information Processing. Again, I picked this class because the title sounded cool, and it wasn’t until the first week of the course that I was informed that the class was about learning Python. Oh, okay, I guess I’m learning Python now. I had always thought that anything Programming related was always going to be beyond me. However, this class went at a pace which was very non-intimating, and I very quickly found that I liked it. I remember that after just a few weeks, I was asked to compare the lists of journal titles from two different databases, to find the titles that were in one list, but not the other. It just took me a little while to use set up a double loop and bang it out. Pretty nifty, and a very good way of proving the utility of this skill set. Another example of this class being very useful is with our government documents collection. A part of how being a depository library works is that there’s a procedure you have to follow to discard items, since they technically belong to the Government Publication Office, your library just houses it. This, at this time, included having to press a “Mark as Discarded” button on the item in the Fed Depository website. We had a few thousand items to discard. After taking this class, I taught myself how to use the Selenium library, and programmed a “button monkey” that would go to the website itself and just plug away at that button. I started running it when I got home from work, went to dinner, and it was done when I came home.
IV. Summer Semester
Independent Research
After my first year I did an independent research project. There was a local non-profit I had worked with which was a nonprofit Christian study space that hosted events, provided a quiet study space for students (with a snack) and had a small library. I say library, but it was two rooms with shelves of books. There, at some time, had been a categorization system, but it was inconsistent, and the books were largely divided by alleged genre. Over the summer, I added every title to a catalog, tagged it with a spine tag, then re-shelved according to order. I also wrote the library policy.
It was a TON of work, but I’m glad I did it. The library had about 1200 unique titles. There was a lot more stuff I thought I’d get done, such as writing research guides, but I really didn’t get around to it. I was sort of rushing to the finish to have all the books back on shelves by the start of the fall term. All in all, I think it was a great experience. How often does someone get to build a library from the ground up, let alone when they’re still a student? I learned a ton, and will continue to learn a ton since I’m continuing to provide support for the library going forward.
The one complaint that I had for the summer was my supervisor. In order to get approved for the IR credits, I needed a supervisor, and I literally just cold-emailed professors until one of them said yes. The deal was that I’d make sure supervising me was low-demand, and they’d be a supervisor of record for admin purposes. The supervisor that I ended up getting said yes, so I put her as the supervisor in my application, got approved then literally never heard from her again.
“Hey, I had a meeting with the director of the nonprofit, here are the ways my project has to adjust.”
*Crickets*.
“I’m starting work for the summer, here’s my proposed schedule.”
*Crickets*.
“I’m halfway through the summer, here’s my progress, and the work remaining.”
*Crickets*.
“I’ve completed the project, here’s my preliminary write-up. Everything look good?”
*Crickets*.
“Okay… I haven’t heard from you at all, so I’m sending this in as my final writeup.”
*Crickets*.
In the last correspondence, I CC’d the academic advising office just to let them know about the situation, if push came to shove, they could intervene. The academic advising office got back to me and said that the supervisor had submitted an A as a final grade, and what else I wanted from her. Like, any feedback? Even just an email with “Okay, looks good.” Would have sufficed. I literally got ghosted by my supervising professor.
V. Third Semester
My last semester was sort of a pivot for me. I knew that I was graduating early, as I was only 12 credits away from completing the program requirements. I also knew that I wanted to take more computer science classes. Not only was it interesting and fun for me, it was proving more and more useful at work, as I was pretty regularly doing projects that used programming. I ended up taking:
1. Programming and Quality in Analytics
2. Data Visualization
3. Database Prototyping and Design
A weird thing happened this semester where I found that I was, for the first time, being challenged by iSchool. I was really sort of taken aback. Why is this hard? Then I realized that the majority of what I had been doing in iSchool up until now has been reading things and writing about them, a skill set I had already very much over-developed. Comparatively, programming and computer science was pretty much entirely new for me.
Programming and Quality in Analytics
Programming and Quality in Analytics was hands down the most challenging, and fun class I’ve taken in iSchool. We used data from WHO’s FluNet, NOAA’s HURDAT, OpenSky’s API, and a ton of other places. My final project was to make a projection of the Spotted Lanternfly in Illinois. We did a ton of stuff with visualizations, data processing, quality checking, and just good ol’ writing code. I learned a TON about CS and python specifically, and definitely grew a lot in this class.
The funny thing, however, is that at the beginning of the class, I was sort of trying to fly under the radar since I technically didn’t even have prerequisites for this class. It required two intro-level programming courses, and I only had one. I was very much forced to learn quickly, and definitely got my butt kicked a LOT.
My final project was such a harrowing experience as well. The online class this year was super small. We had like 7 people, and almost all the class participation came from me and one other guy. We paired up for an earlier project and everything went quite well, so when we got our final assignment, we decided to pair up again.
Everything went well at first until about Thanksgiving, when my partner sort of dropped off for a little bit. This wasn’t a problem at all, and I assumed he was taking some time to relax and hang out with his family, which was great for him. I just kept working at making commits and finished what I thought was the remaining scope of the project. All that was left to do was to refine things, refactor to avoid repetition, write doc tests, and write documentation. I was like great, when get backs to it, we should be able to circle the wagons and just get this turned in.
However, when he returned he started on a whole different scope of the project, increasing its complexity by probably threefold. I didn’t want to just be dismissing my partner’s contributions. On the other hand, he was, from my perspective, needlessly complicating things so much. The project was done. Just do the formal requirements, submit the project, and go on holiday break! The especially frustrating thing was that a lot of times, he would implement something and it would break the existing code. This resulted in me making branches from the repository just to make sure that I had something that worked, instead of something which was constantly backsliding. This was so frustrating since I’d consulted the professor in office hours about the initial scope of the project and he said that it was already “well above the average scope for this assignment.” We ended up submitting a project with so many “add-on” features that it was more or less two projects, with rivaling projections and conclusions. Along the way, there were volleys of accusations of breaking code, changing code, not working in the main branch, and at times my partner even locked me out of the main branch.
On the last day the final was due, the professor moved a zoom call scheduled from that morning to that evening even though the final was due at noon. He sat us down and said that the problems we were having never really came up in his class projects, because for these projects in the past, students either work alone, or one student normally cared and did all the work while the other partner or two coasted. Our issue was that we both cared intensely and were very invested in the project. This meant that the code we wrote was good, but lacked the sort of cohesive direction that comes from a single-decision maker. He also said not to worry about that, since if we were ever in any sort of professional environment doing this sort of work, there would be a project lead or senior dev who would make the final calls to avoid this sort of conflict. He said that since 80-90% of the class participation came from the two of us and we’d done very well on the homework assignments all year, doing both his “core goals” as well as “stretch goals”, we shouldn’t worry about our grade. Our project did so much that he was going to use it as an in-class example going forward. We were the type of students that makes teaching worth it year after year, and if he didn’t have students like us, he would have given up long ago. Just take a deep breath from the project, put it behind us, and enjoy the break.
The worst thing, for a lot of the project, is that my wife and I were finding, purchasing and moving into a house. Between the chaos of just a mountain of financial instruments, contracts, and the stuff around the house, I was still going to work every day. I remember the day off that zoom call, I had to drive back to my old apartment since that’s the only place that had Wi-Fi set up. The whole apartment was empty except the Wi-Fi router and modem in the corner of the old living room, and a lawn chair I had grabbed from the trunk of the car. It was just me sitting there in the dark on this zoom call while the professor assured us that we had done a great job and to be proud of ourselves, and that we had nothing to worry about after a month and a half of continuous stress about this project. After this happened, I was retelling this narrative to a friend of ours, and he said “Man, that’s a core memory for sure.” I concur.
The reason why this class didn’t rank higher is use is that a good deal of what I learned is more complex than I’ve been able to find useful at work.
Database Prototyping and Design
This class was perhaps the most frustrating of all. The professor would just show up to the zoom class, read through a slide deck for half the class, then call it quits. The slides were never very good either, so when it came time to do the homework, I pretty much had to teach myself all the material, using websites, the “optional” textbooks, or the asking friends. I’m also one of those students that doesn’t mind participating in class. I try not to be annoying, but if I have a question, I’ll pop it in the chat or speak up. However, there were times when I did this in this class and the professor has basically yelled at me for not knowing the answer already. Like, what? This class was on SQL, a language I was entirely new to. In fact, it was my first exposure to any declarative paradigm, so the syntax was all new to me as well. Then he’d get frustrated at the class that no one participated or asked questions. He’d say there was no point to a synchronous live session if we weren’t going to engage, while actively dissuading us from engaging.
For one assignment, he gave us about 150 lines of boiler plate spaghetti code, and more or less told us to fix it. It was a script for a stored procedure for ETL. In class, the professor heavily emphasized that this was super important, and that we would have to know this in order to any kind of data warehousing role. The first thing I do when I feel like I’ll need help with an assignment is google around for similar processes. We’re doing basic SQL here, so it’s all pretty straightforward. However, this time I found nothing about this procedure. Hmm. Then I went to the lecture slides to look at the citations. One was a boiler plate citation to our “optional” textbook. The other was a citation to a research paper. Written decades ago. By the professor. I found the paper and yup, there it is. All that boiler plate code right there in the paper. Then I thought to myself, surely this paper has been cited or otherwise used widely as an industry standard for him to present it to us like this, so I looked up the citations on google scholar. The paper has been cited five times.
Doing this project was so difficult because not only did I have to understand the assignment, I also had to fix HIS code. There was a portion of this code I just couldn’t figure out, so I hopped on a call with my brother in law, and he just said to rewrite it, so i wrote maybe 8 lines in place of the professor’s 20 and it worked great. The second time he assigned something like this I just rewrote the boiler plate from the beginning, and it took maybe one fifth the time.
In the end, I wrote the professor scathing course evaluation with full knowledge that the evals are released long after grades are finalized. It got to a point where I was honestly considering running it through ChatGPT in order to change the style to not sound like me. However, all of it was honest, so I have no qualms about doing so.
Data Visualization
I will start by saying that I loved this class and had a lot of fun in it. However, the class was very unstructured. Because this class had no pre-requisites, students of all different technical abilities joined, and so the expectations were quite low. Since I knew I had the assignments in the bag, I just followed the instructions, then tried to make the most visually compelling visualizations I could. This was a ton of fun, and I made some visualizations that I thought were really cool and compelling. I’m already thinking of ways I can use some of these at work, instead of the regular old bar/line/scatter/pie charts. The instructor was also super helpful and nice. The class was also really laid back, which very helpful for this semester.
I think this class ought to be two classes, and said as much in my feedback to the instructor. It takes a level of programming familiarity to be able to get to the creative elements of something. Like if a new student uses matplotlib to make bar plots, the lines are going to be black and the bar is going to be blue. Why? Those at the defaults for matplotlib. That’s not a creative decision on their part. If you asked them why they chose these colors, well, they didn’t. The colors are the first ones in the box. However, a little tinkering can change color, opacity, fill, etc. It can be something that someone is actually intentionally using. To create a visualization. But when half the class is on one level and other half is on another, you can’t set the bar too high. The result is a bifurcated that half the class is doing the high jump and half the class is doing the limbo.
This class is very useful. A lot of what I do with programming at work is to present information in more intuitive ways, and this class is very helpful for that. In fact, the chart I made for this blog post was made using tools from this class!
VI. Classes I Wish I Took
1. Reference and Information Services
A lot of what I do at work is reference, especially when I was still part-time. If I was working 20 hours a week, I’d go into the office three times a week, and every time I’d do a reference shift, so I’d end up spending almost half my in-office time manning the reference desk. I had a colleague who took an analogous course at UT’s iSchool when she was getting her MIS degree, and said this class was supremely helpful. But having gotten pretty adept at reference interactions, it’s difficult for me to imagine this class teaching something that I can’t learn on the job. I still wish I took it though, since it seems so foundational and so integral to my work.
2. Instructional Strategies and Techniques for Information Professionals
As I’m teaching more and more, I really wish I had taken this class. The professor that teaches it at UIUC was also highly recommended to me by a colleague. Teaching is an area that I feel like I still have a lot to learn in, and wish I had a more official foundation in it.
3. Rare Books and Special Collections
This class is always one of the most in-demand classes, and for a hot second, I had a seat in it. However, it was during my last semester and a 2 credit course just didn’t work out. I’m a bit of an antiquarian in both interest and habit, so this class’s topics were right up my alley. We also have a rare books librarian at my library, and her work is always fascinating to me.
4. ASL for Librarians
This class was offered to UIUC iSchool students through WISE (Web-based Information Science Education), which is a collaboration between six different universities to provide online classes for students at each school. I’ve always been interested in learning ASL, and this opportunity seemed very rare and useful. However, again, it was my last semester, and the credits didn’t work out.
5. Data Structures & Algorithms
This class was taught by my Programming and Quality in Data Analytics professor, whom I really liked and learned a lot from. The course was also sold to me as a class that was about developing algorithms with both designing and solving games. However, it was a new course, and was only offered after I finished the program.
6. Machine Learning Cloud
This class was co-taught by my Foundations of Information Processing professor whom I really liked and learned a lot from. The course is about how to use machine learning principles to process information, and a lot of the technical skills required to do this, such as specifying input/output pipes. I think this skillset would have been much more data science focused, and could have helped a lot. However, this course was only offered after I finished the program.
VII. Conclusion
If I could do it all again, I would have taken the computer science classes from the beginning, then feathered in other classes each semester to buffer the workload. Three four-credit programming classes was a lot of work my last semester. It would also have helped me take more of the classes that stacked, due to skillset and prereq demands. Maybe I would have gotten to take those more advanced programming classes.
I would have skipped Competitive Intelligence as well as Government Information. Both classes were fine, but neither ended up offering me very much professionally.
I would have taken a different SQL class, since I honestly hated that one so much.
If I did all that, I think I still could have graduated in 3 semesters, and everything probably would have gone much smoother. However, that’s life, right?
Craquelure 