Core Reflective Essay

We are living in the information age. I've often spoken of the Internet and the World Wide
Web as an ocean of information, and I believe it is an apt metaphor. Imagine people at a beach;
some just dip their toes in, some are competent swimmers, some surf it or sail it, some snorkel
and dive. But considering the vastness and depth of an ocean, most people will only experience
the surface of it. Like an ocean, the Internet is part of our intellectual and social landscape, and
has become a fixture of our daily lives. The ocean metaphor could be expanded, but I'll end it
here. Unlike an actual ocean, the body of information produced by humanity (much of it
accessed through the internet) grows exponentially. Through the Library and Information
Science Program at the University at Buffalo, I have a strong understanding of the nature of
information, in how human knowledge is organized, how information is indexed to provide
access to seekers of information, an in the role of the librarian as facilitator to those seeking
information.
LIS 505, Introduction to Library and Information Studies, with Dr. Kate Collier, taken in the
fall of 2013, was a course designed to provide me with this "big picture" understanding of the
vastness of the body of human knowledge and the role libraries and librarians have played in
helping information seekers find information. We students learned about the different kinds of
libraries, and began to see our own favorite libraries with new perspectives. I visited my alma
mater Community College's library, spoke to the professionals there, and diagrammed its
organizational structure. From the college board of directors to the student workers at the
circulation desk, I discovered how this library is funded and governed, and how it manages to
check materials out to patrons, assist patrons in finding materials, select and acquire materials
and catalog them so the can be accessed, and educate students in information literacy.
Censorship was topic of study in this course. In one assignment, I remembered my junior
high school days in the early 1980s and some books that were facing banning challenges. Judy
Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and The Anarchist's Cookbook were challenges
that I remembered as being my introduction to the concept of censorship. This course, though,
took me beyond the issue of book banning to think about a librarian's role in providing access to
materials. I learned about The Library Bill of Rights and internalized the principal that a
librarian is not a gate-keeper; she is not a warden who will grant or deny a person access to
information based on the content of the information or the attributes of the information seeker.
To do so would violate the patron's right to intellectual freedom.
A required text for the course was Richard Rubin's Foundations of Library and Information
Science, and in it, Richard Rubin explained that Intellectual freedom is based on a fundamental
belief that the health of a democratic society is maintained and improved when ideas can be
created and disseminated without governmental, political, or social impediment (Rubin 375).
I was particularly taken by the way Rubin restated this principal in layman's terms: the best
way to combat a bad idea is not to suppress it, but to produce a better idea (Rubin 375). This
phraseology isn't exactly unique to this book; it emerges in various forms in discussions about
the First Amendment and in defense of a free press. To me, the principal if intellectual freedom
is much more than a librarian's value; it's an American value and a human value.

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One of the readings in LIS 506, Introduction to Information Technology, began with a quote
from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change" (Hendrix 3). Technology and computer skills are
adaptations necessary to remain relevant in the 21st century. Libraries are becoming increasingly
electronic; we have books without pages, and we now need libraries without walls. Without a
foundation in information technology, we can't meet the needs of our users in the digital age, and
it is the needs of our users that drive our changes.
This course covered the nature of information. Almost every moment of every day, we are
awash in data and sensory input: words and pictures scroll across our screens, sounds come from
televisions and radios, we write and read and listen and speak. We process the input into
something useful, information. We store and share data and information using computers, so it is
important to understand how computers work.
The final project for the course was the creation of a website for a real nonprofit organization.
Bust, NY, is a tiny village in Chautauqua County near my home. The Busti Historical Society
has a restored old grist mill and a small museum, and every year they hold an apple festival by
the mill and museum. They were in need of a web presence, and they were the perfect client for
this project. Through this course, I learned how to write HTML code and build a website, and I
also learned how to organize information and present it in ways that met the needs of the Busti
Historical Society as well as the visitors to the web page. This was a valuable, real-world
application of the course material.
In LIS 571 Organization and Control of Recorded Information, I learned more about how
computers help connect users to information. A user who uses a keyword in a search engine to
find out information about the Busti Apple Festival will be taken to the website I helped create in
LIS 506. But he won't see the HTML code that made that connection possible. Likewise, users
of a library's online public access catalog may be unaware of the work involved in cataloging
materials and creating digital bibliographic records so that their keywords and computer searches
can produce useful results and connect them to an item that can help them with an information
need.
In the 19th century, the Dewey Decimal system was created to organize the body of human
knowledge so that library users could find materials. In my first semester, in LIS 505, I wrote a
research paper about the cultural bias in the Dewey Decimal System. I was fascinated by the
ways in which the cultural norms of the 19th century were represented in the organization of
knowledge. Books discussing homosexuality were shelved with "mental derangements," sewing
was classified as a technology, to name a few. Dewey has changed with the times, but in this
course, we considered other changes to the organization of knowledge that may come in the
future. We contemplated the elimination of Dewey and what systems could replace it and how
that would affect information seekers.
When contemplating the future, though, I was most interested in the OPAC. As our libraries
become more and more virtual spaces, what does that mean for our OPAC and our users? I
researched this for a paper I wrote in this course, and was introduced to the concept of the OPAC
as a social space (Williams 2). This means that our OPACs can and must move beyond the
traditional organization and retrieval functions or become irrelevant to our users needs.

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Sharon Q. Yang of Rider University Libraries and Kurt Wagner of William Paterson
University call it "next generation cataloging." (Yang & Wagner, 691). They say that library
OPACs have remained relatively static through the years, have not kept pace with the kinds of
search tools that users are encountering in other places online, and until recently, there was no
solution for outdated OPACs to update services for their users. Now, though, there are third
party components that can be added to existing OPACS and provide users with the ability to tag,
but also features like relevance ranking, spell checking, and search facets (691). This idea has
remained in my mind since first reading about it. If the OPAC is a social space, then it is a tool
we can use to build a community of readers. My cooperating LMC is very good at suggesting
books for her readers, but I would love to try out tagging in the OPAC so that readers could more
easily recommend books to each other. In an increasingly digital environment, enhancements
like tagging can improve the user experience, and be a positive and Darwinian adaptation to
change.
While LIS 506 and 571, with their focus on information as data that can be stored, managed,
transferred, and shared, LIS 518 approached information not as "a product to be delivered, but as
a process to be experienced" (Keefer). In this course, we focused on how we can connect our
library users with the information they seek. Unlike a computer which responds predictably to
specific commands, our users are human beings with diverse questions, skills, competencies, and
behaviors. In this user-centered course, I came to understand how a reference librarian must
"move from an emphasis on getting the right answer to finding out the right question" (Keefer)
In this course, we came to understand our users and considered their information needs and
their information seeking behaviors. Carol Kuhlthau's model of the information search process
came into play, especially when we practiced conducting online reference services. At the
beginning of the interaction, we took into account the uncertainty that our information seeker
could be experiencing. We communicated with our user as he narrowed his focus and we were
able to collect useful material for him. We didn't have the opportunity to meet as a group and
practice face-to-face reference interactions, but more and more, users are seeking reference help
through online chat sessions. In this course, we learned that a reference librarian does more than
look up answers to questions. She interviews the user to get to the heart of the question, she
finds out what the user has tried before asking for help, and she "teaches from the desk" by
helping the user become a more independent seeker of information.
In the past, in the early days of the public library, information seekers were expected to be
independent. Joseph Janes, in Introduction to Reference Work in the Digital Age says that in the
early days, "helping people was a distraction from more important work and therefore having a
lot of reference books available was a good idea, so readers wouldn't bug the librarians" (Janes
6). I enjoyed reading about the history of reference services. I remember an anecdote in Jane's
chapter from the writings of Samuel Swett Green written in 1876. Green recalled a young
woman who had come to the library wanting to know what was a "scollop [sic]." It took him an
hour to find the answer! The user was looking for a scallop, a kind of shellfish. The brief story
described the difficulty of his search for her answer, and his dedication to finding it for her. I did
some independent investigating of Green (the Janes article said that more of the work from
which that anecdote came was available online) and enjoyed reading about him as one of the
founders of the American Library Association and the "father of library reference work." He

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pioneered the idea that the library was not just a repository of books but a service to the
community. He once said, "A librarian should be as unwilling to allow an inquirer to leave the
library with his question unanswered as a shopkeeper is to have a customer go out of his store
without making a purchase" (Nix). This course strengthened my commitment to servicing the
community and the user. Understanding the user and finding empathy with those who struggle
with the process of information seeking will give me the patience and disposition to help
students become independent searchers in the future.
The scope of the core courses, LIS 515, 506, 518, and 517 has been broad. I learned about the
early days of libraries and librarianship and the early thinkers who began to consider ways to
organize the body of recorded human knowledge. I learned about revolutionary thinkers like
Samuel Swett Green who saw the library not as a warehouse for the collection and preservation
of books, but as a community service dedicated to the sharing of knowledge. I learned how
bibliographic records that provide access points to information have transitioned from card
catalogs to digital MARC records, and researched ways in which technological advancements
will continue to make us strive to find new and better ways to meet the needs of our patrons.
Through the past and into the future, a common thread runs: we are dedicated to our
communities, our patrons, our schools, and our students and we take seriously our commitment
to intellectual freedom and to empowering our patrons to be independent searchers of
information in a community of learners.

Works Cited
Hendrix, Jennifer. "Checking Out the Future Perspectives from the Library Community on

Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries." ALA Office for Information

Technology Policy, Policy Brief No. 2 (2010): n. pag. Print.

Janes, Joseph. Introduction to Reference Work in the Digital Age. New York: Neal-Schuman,

2003. Print.

Keefer, Jane. "The hungry rats syndrome: library anxiety, information literacy, and the academic

reference process." RQ Spring 1993: 333+. Academic OneFile. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

Nix, Larry T. "Library History Buff Blog." : Samuel Swett Green, Father of Library Reference

Work. N.p., 20 Feb. 2012. Web. 09 Apr. 2015. <http://

libraryhistorybuff.blogspot.com/2012/02/samuel-swett-green-father-of-library.html>.

Rubin, Richard. Foundations of Library and Information Science. New York: Neal-Schuman,

2004. Print.

Williams, R. D. (2013). A Tangle of Tags: The Impact of User-generated Tagging in Public

Library Catalogs. In AISI&T Annual Meeting 2013 (pp. 1-9). Montreal. Retrieved April

29, 2014, from https://www.asis.org/asist2013/abstracts/papers/98.html.