Off the Mark

As many of you know, I began in the Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) degree program at GSLIS, UIUC the day after I graduated with my Masters in May 2006.

In the past almost 18 months I have answered far too many times as to why I was pursuing further education in the field. It seems to have tapered lately. Thankfully. Here is what the program page has to say:

Librarians, information scientists, and others in information management enroll in the program to refresh and update their skills, gain greater specialization in their professional training, or redirect their careers from one area to another.

Gaining greater specialization and hopefully even feeling adequate to the task were my goals. I also managed to get a couple different assistantships doing the actual kind of work I think I want to pursue—serials cataloging graduate assistant, thesaurus maintenance GA, moonographic cataloging GA. I loved my earlier assistantships at GSLIS and being on Team Awesome, but they had basically nothing to do with my job goals.

The requirements for the degree include:

This 40 semester hour course of study is structured to encourage students to design programs that meet specific educational and career goals. A sequence of 32 hours of courses is developed by students with their advisors. Up to 16 of the hours may be taken outside of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. The final eight hours are the CAS project, a substantive investigation of a problem in librarianship or information science, which is followed by a final oral examination.

In my application letter I stated that:

I intend to pursue further study in the areas of cataloging and classification, ontologies and thesauri, metadata, folksonomies, XML, and other topics related to the organization and classification of information, broadly defined. My goal is to become a cataloger or metadata librarian in an academic setting, one who is prepared to make continuing contributions to the wider field.

It seems that I did just that, and this is still my goal. My stated project idea has been less than realized, though:

Within the literature on cataloging and classification education I have noticed a distinct dichotomy between the LIS educators and the cataloging practitioners. Moreover, these practitioners are usually senior catalogers and/or supervisors. There seems to be a distinct lack of connection between these two extremes. I propose to survey new cataloging practitioners (<5 years experience) to discover the following: how well prepared they felt prior to taking their first job; how well prepared they found they, in fact, were, and in what areas; what they wish they had learned prior to their first job; what means were available in their work environment to make up any lack in their knowledge, and how well supported they were in pursuing that goal. My hope is that by addressing this lack of attention to the critical middle ground in this dispute—the new cataloging practitioner—that the two ends may be brought closer together in the pursuit of a quality education for the cataloger of the future.

I would still like to see someone do this, and do it well. But for many reasons it became clear that it was not going to be me to do so. I do not regret that decision at all. My reasons for deciding against this topic are probably not that relevant to any one else. If you are interested, buy me a beer of a coffee at a conference or somewhere else some time and I will do my best to recount them. If you are seriously considering a topic like this yourself then I will gladly communicate with you via whatever means in the case that my reasons may or may not (most likely) be relevant to you. And, honestly, I can no longer remember all of them.

No longer having an idea in mind for a topic—which happened fairly quickly actually—I went about pursuing my interests in the courses that I took. While I was unable to take every course that I listed in my application letter as being my proposed course of study—some weren’t offered or other things were more important at the moment—I did take several of them and a few others that fit well within the prose description of my proposed course of study. [If you are interested in seeing the courses I took the complete list can be found here, with the CAS work beginning Summer 2006.]

But I still needed a topic for my project, “a substantive investigation of a problem in librarianship or information science.” As I wrote the other day, I have found it.

Simply put, I am going to attempt to apply Integrationism to the field of LIS. At the moment [last several months], I have been reading primarily about integrational linguistics. Well, perhaps that’s not fair; maybe I’ve just been thinking about it that way. Many of Harris’ books are far broader than linguistics.

I’ve set up a CAS Project category under Education—UIUC—GSLIS. I probably need one for Integrationism, but don’t know where I want to put it yet. Hmm, maybe under Theory?

My topic for this semester’s Bibliography class has been shifted more along these lines from its original topic as noted in previously linked recent blog entries.

As I said in a comment on the “Tunneling for rabbits” post:

I will be posting things here and there on the blog, asking questions, trying to elicit citations and/or suggestions, probably dropping some “overviews” or pieces of sections of the paper as it develops. Please feel extremely free to chime in.

While an overview of Integrationism as I see it should probably be first up, it will not be. I have various (weak?) reasons for this. Primarily, I have read several book-length critiques in which Integrationism figures. I have only recently gotten my hands on more condensed materials. Thus, this one will have to wait a while.

First up, besides the ramblings over the past few days [sorry if those reappeared in your aggregators when I added the CAS Project category to them], will be notes on my re-reading of Hjørland’s “Semantics and Knowledge Organization” from ARIST 41: 2007.

If you are local, or will be on 9 Oct, you will want to read the above article in preparation for Dr. Hjørland’s Research Fellow lecture, entitled “Arguments for the “bibliographical paradigm”.” Of course, I recommend it to all.

Sorry I cannot link to the other paper on which his talk will be based: Hjørland, B. (2007). “Arguments for ‘the bibliographical paradigm’. Some thoughts inspired by the new English edition of the UDC” Information Research, 12(4). When it is available it will supposedly be at this link. As you can see from the index at Information Research no. 4 is not yet online.

If you can get to GSLIS, “copies of these papers will be available in a binder on the second floor near the copier.” Otherwise, ARIST stays on reserve in the LIS Library. If you are not at UIUC, hopefully you have access to ARIST via your library and I did my best to point you to the CoLIS6 paper. Even if the “direct” link is bad, I did point you to the main index of Information Research. Both papers are well worth reading, whether or not you agree with the premises and arguments.

I am excited about my CAS project. Hopefully I will remain so.

I invite you communicate with me as I progress. Answer my questions, point me to sources, challenge something I wrote, …. I may not fully respond to everything—although I will hopefully acknowledge all—if for whatever reason I think something will lead me too far astray. I will prefer more condensed, article-length, sources or book chapters [format agnostic] to rambling, full-length books. In many cases, I will be consulting lots of tertiary literature—encyclopedias & dictionaries of a field and so on. This clearly goes against my habitually probing generalist nature, but I have not the time to do otherwise.

If for some reason you prefer not to comment publicly, you can use my contact form above. I may then give you my school email as I try to keep school-related stuff segregated from non-school where possible. I know, I know. That does not sound like me but such is the pain of multiple email accounts. And, yes, I am supposedly working on a “solution” but it is not the biggest priority at the moment.

So wish me well or snicker behind my back at the ridiculously large task I’ve set myself. I prefer the first but honestly it makes no difference to me. I get interested in what I get interested in and I have little control over it.