MLIS Progress: 5/6 Complete...

DAMN these past two years flew by. Summer session has come to a close and I only have Fall before I can consider myself a full-fledged librarian.

Out of the 12 classes I have/will take, I will have a total of 11 different professors, I choose to only have 1 professor for two different classes. I had some bad professors and I had some really good ones. I had some interesting classes while others not so much but it's kind of hard for certain subjects/lessons/lecture overlap.

For example, I honestly cannot understand why Ranganathan's Five Laws of the Library Science was so important/emphasized. For one class we were supposed to do a paper and presentation on a famous library figure. Since this was one of the required courses, this was one of the first classes for a lot of students. The professor handed out a sheet with some pre-approved figures. I could only recognize the names of a few: Dewey, Cutter, Pearl, and Ranganathan.

I only recognized the last one because my friend mentioned him before.  During a break in lecture, I did a quick Google search and decided on Benjamin Franklin . When I told the professor who I chose, she gave me an incredulous look and said, "oookkkaaayyy," like I just chose to swim with Jaws instead of Flipper.  Maybe it's my going against the hype/traditional-route attitude but I felt Ben deserved to be acknowledged for his contributions to the institution *gasp* IN A LIBRARY SCHOOL PROGRAM.  Of course I titled my presentation, "It's All About the Benjamin's," and I used the following image.  This certain professor felt that Ranganathan was so important that he deserved two presentations by two different students.  Really??

I personally feel like the library school looks at other grad curriculum's with envy because of all the "cool" rules and what I can only call "lessons in an acronym."  There's the 5 P's in Marketing, in general there's the 80/20 rule, even boring Accounting has A.L.O.E., F.I.F.O. and L.I.F.O.  What does the Library have --- classification tables.  What I'm trying to say is that it really isn't needed and it comes off as trying too hard.

If there is one major lesson I learned from these past two years in library school, it would be the librarian's / library's never-ending struggle for proving one's worth and relevance, and longing for a sense of belonging and struggle for self-actualization --- Hello Maslow.  I feel like it's a reverse self-fulfilling prophecy with nonstop ALA-approved press releases about libraries being more important than ever.  It makes me wonder how much the debate and doubt of the library as a necessity vs. budget-cutting luxury is really self-inflicted.