This semester was an important one because it was time to decide how I wanted to focus my MLIS education. It felt akin to being a child and having a grown up ask, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Choosing a career pathway and planning the relevant courses for the remainder of my studies became a source of great anxiety.
By the beginning of the semester, I had narrowed down my choices to Digital Curation, Information Organization, or Web Programming and Information Architecture. Like all information pathways, these share significant overlap. However, they differ enough that I knew I was at a critical juncture and I had to make a choice. I was fortunate that I decided to take INFO 204 because it played a critical role in helping me determine my primary career pathway.
INFO 204, INFO 240 (Beginning HTML), and many sleepless nights of soul-searching, inspired me to focus on Web Programming and Information Architecture (with forays into Information Organization and Metadata). First, I am passionate about the democratizing force of the Internet and how it can fulfill our information seeking needs. Second, INFO 204 taught me that being a librarian doesn’t always mean having to be in a library.
Although the foundational skills of the web programming career pathway (such as knowledge of technology) were influential to my decision, several key topics inspired me to apply principles of librarianship to the Internet . Overall, these are information policy, the hyperlinked library, and information literacy. Please follow the above links to read about my inspiration.