Acronyms and Initialisms My Library Degree Failed to Teach
I’ve been told many times since completing my M.L.I.S. that most skills related to library and archival work are developed on the job. In fact, I realized about halfway through my degree program that my professional training would continue well after grad school. Not unlike other professional-academic hybrid programs, library school provided a sufficient foundation, but the bigger challenges and learning experiences came during my practicum and in my daily work, as well as in the various (un)conferences and workshops I’ve attended and professional development courses I’ve elected to take since graduation. In many ways, this suits the overall learning style and personality of the “typical” librarian or archivist (without getting onto a tangent, I think it’s safe to assume that most librarians would consider themselves to be relatively eclectic and prolific learners). Generally, this approach to learning is indeed a very comfortable one for me. While I enjoyed the rich academic world of the humanities as an undergrad – exploring ideas through research, reading and writing – library and information science requires a higher degree of hands-on experience and purposeful technical training. Sure, LIS programs include conventional graduate reading seminars, research papers, etc. But unlike, say, history, where a historian-in-training may expect to use and hone these skills over the course of a long career in scholarly research and writing, the average librarian or archivist will not be publishing books, writing for academic journals, or conducting original research. Information professionals certainly need an academic, scholarly background, but I’m not sure I consider them (us) to be academics or scholars in the usual sense. We have too many responsibilities, too many constituencies, too many rules and protocols, and too many acronyms and abbreviations.
