Work and School

A belated welcome to my blog! I was absent for a little while because I was juggling a lot of responsibility. I'm a very lucky MLS student in that I have secured a professional job while still a student. This has been a mixed blessing, however, because juggling a professional job and graduate school can be very difficult and time consuming.

The purpose of this, the first of many posts, is to discuss the importance of gaining real-world experience as part of the MLS. I have been working for a library on Capitol Hill in addition to a Congressional Committee. The work in the library has allowed me to see and learn first-hand how libraries operate and how concepts such as controlled vocabularies and other standardization of things like dates can be applied to information. In my work at the library, I help in the creation of a database of knowledge about current and former Members of Congress. In entering their dates of service, (ie January 4, 1995 to December 15, 2000) we saw that the database would only use the start date as a way to express which Congress the Member served in, even though in the example given, the Member served in three Congresses--the 104th, 105th and 106th. We then realized that we had to enter the dates of service in two-year chunks so that the system would recognize each Congress and be able to generate complete lists of which members served in which Congress.

This is the sort of concept discussed in the Organization of Information, but using the concepts in a real-world environment, it made me realize how important it is and allowed me to apply the concepts on my own, making them more concrete and memorable. For this and many other reasons, I would highly recommend that all MLS students get a job or internship in a library during their time in school.