Becoming a Librarian

I've elected to use my blog posts for this course to mostly reflect upon my fast approaching completion of my MLS degree and less on the specific topics of this course. I hope that this use is satisfactory. Since my MLS degree is less than two months away I'm finding that I am very often reflecting on this accomplishment and trying to make sense about what this means to me. This is not the first time I'm mentioning this, but I mainly took the courses in LIS so I could continue to learn about how and why people learn and less because I wanted to become a librarian. In the course of my LIS studies I have vastly increased a number of abilities that could be said to be attributed to being a librarian. For example, I now look very critically at information in order to determine its validity and authenticity. I feel my search strategies have vastly improved. I know the value of various search tools, but I still have difficulty understanding why true federated searching is not the norm.

Although I did not enroll in the MLS program to become a Librarian, now that the end is nearly in sight, I'm very proud that I will join this important and elite group. I feel that my abilities have matched those of what are desired by the profession. It is unfortunate that in my career there seems to be an unlikely prospect in the near future of my job responsibilities becoming more in-tune with those of  the librarian profession.

One thing I would like to point out is that I clearly see my job as an instructional designer for the University at Buffalo to be extremely similar to the responsibilities of a school library media center. The main similarity is the need to collaborate with instructors to assist them in their quest to help students towards achieving a maximally effective learning environment.