I am now beginning my very last quarter of grad school, and I'm just taking two classes. One is on Library Automation Systems and is taught by one of the tech people from the Law Library. The class seems cool, and it is after all my current chosen career path. I am finding myself in the strange position of possessing the job that everyone else in the class apparently wishes they had. One classmate (who graduated last year) actually expressed a desire to shadow me at work. Wow.
The other class, Management of Information Organizations, is required. I don't get a choice about whether to take it or not. (Well, I suppose technically I could refuse to take it, but then the iSchool will refuse to give me a diploma.) The first day was okay, but the professor spent most of the class talking about diversity. Diversity is all well and good, but this is supposed to be a class about management. Management with a side order of diversity is okay. Diversity with a little management on the side is not.
Dorothea Salo says:
Can I gank your syllabus from Library Automation Systems? We don't have a course like that here, and I definitely feel the lack of it.
I'm taking That Management Course this summer. Four weeks instead of sixteen... :)
Laurabelle says:
The course website is http://courses.washington.edu/lis587/. So far, I've found that the reading assignments are actually fairly helpful; yesterday I read a few chapters on project management and then drew directly from them during my job interview today!
Unfortunately, the limitation of a class on library automation systems is that you can only learn so much without an actual system to work on. It's not a big deal for me (I've been playing with Dynix for going on a year now), but for all the other wannabe systems librarians in my class, it's a hardship. Small vendors will give us demos to play with, but the big guys (Dynix, Innovative, Sirsi, etc.) won't. (Even if we had the hardware available to run their humongous sytems.) The same applies for you; without an instructor or formal class, you probably couldn't even get demos from the little guys. I don't know what to tell you about that, but good luck.
Certainly let me know if there's anything I can do to help you. And if it makes you feel any better, my impression is that most systems librarians aren't specially trained for it; they just sort of grow into the position from wherever they happened to be before. It's an odd place to be, a bridge between the ultra-technical world and the strange conservatisms of the library universe.
Dorothea Salo says:
Oh, believe me, I understand the limitations of learning in the abstract. It is, however, better than nothing -- and "nothing" is what one can learn about ILS's where I am.
I still have to talk to SLIS people about finding me a campus library job so I can teach for them. Maybe I'll ask 'em if they can apprentice me to their sysadmins. :)