The name on the diploma matches my own, so I guess that’s about as official as it gets. Now what?
It’s sort of like the types of questions you field on your birthday: Do you feel any different? Do you feel older? Now that I have a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science, am I supposed to feel more qualified, more skillful, more prepared to tackle the issues, both gigantic and petty, that face librarians old and new?
This is partly why I have started this blog: to stimulate a process of exploration, questioning, and dialog about what it means to be, or maybe more importantly to become, a librarian. The skills — cataloging, teaching a bibliographic instruction class, tracking down an elusive source for a patron — are one thing, but issues of identity and purpose are quite another. As I begin my professional career, I want to be mindful of both.
I hope to write about both the abstract and the concrete, the macro and the micro. This is a bit of an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes.
