Final Project: PART 1: Letter To A Future Library Science Student

Letter to a Future Library Science Student

Responsibilities

Fraser heights secondary school is home to and known for its prestigious academic related courses, such as honours courses in math, AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC, and to Science Academy, a joint venture program with Simon Fraser University. That is not however what Fraser Heights is limited to. The school offers a plethora of extravagant courses including various workshop courses, computer based design courses(CAD, CNC) and to courses like library science.

Library science, as the name implies is a broad based library course. It opens up as an elective to students from grade 10 to 12, however, the grade 12 course only opens up if you have taken one of the previous library science courses. The course allows for anywhere between one to four students per block.

Students rotate between working at the desk and performing various tasks in library. This aspect is what differentiates it from other courses. The total accumulated grade is made up of 50% work experience and 50% course-related work.

Typically, the duties of a desk worker are very general. These duties include: checking books in and out, helping people find books, signing out mobile technology. When not on the desk, tasks and duties include: organizing books, tidying the library, keeping appearances up, putting displays up, finding books, helping students/classes(if requested), and various other miscellaneous tasks. These duties, both on desk and off desk, don’t take up an extraneous amount of time. Students usually take this additional time to catch up on homework from other classes, or library science blog assignments.

The most important aspect of library science is paying due diligence. Library Science as a course, work experience and course assignments included, is not very difficult. This however leads many students procrastinate on doing their work until a later date. Working on whatever it is that is assigned as soon as possible is a wise decision. Paying due diligence also means to pay attention and learn/remember. There are many duties that become easier if you just learn it and remember it. For example, when someone comes to check ipads out, just knowing the combination to the lock pad would be easier than checking the piece of paper with all of the lock combinations each time. Another example of just remembering being an asset would be when someone comes in to ask about where a book is. If you know how the library is sectioned off and know which books are where, helping the person would become a much simpler task.

The greatest weakness I displayed during the course is quite possibly my lack of paying due diligence. The most important thing to have in the class is also the thing that I lacked for a majority of it. Me personally, I didn’t heed my own advice. Whenever I got an assignment I would put it off until later in favour of only working on homework from other classes. The assignments slowly started piling up and the amount of work got larger and larger until it was almost the end of term one and I had two posts out of nine posts to do. Instead of doing them all at the end, it would’ve just been easier to do them the moment they were assigned because individually they didn’t take that much time. Combined, it was stressful trying to finish seven blog posts and a book trailer in a day.

What I enjoy the most about the course is the flexibility of it. The time that isn’t spent doing general library duties is up to you how you want to spend it. There is a lot of extra time that you get to do homework to get ahead, to catch up on homework, to read books, and just about anything else that is beneficial to you as a student. I’m sitting in the library right now working on my final assignment for library science. The flexibility of the course is a good thing, however, sometimes it can allow for a student to be too carefree and complacent about how they spend their time.

The only thing I really disliked about the course was that I wasn’t allowed to sit anywhere that I wanted. There’s a designated table for all the library science students and sometimes it would be too loud for me to concentrate properly.

Suggestions/Tips for Success

There’s a lot of things that you can do to become a better library science student and these traits can also be transferred over to becoming a better student in general.

1. As mentioned before, diligence is very important in this class. And in any class for that matter. However, it is of the utmost importance in library science due to how spread out assignments are. Completing an assignment the moment it’s assigned doesn’t take a long time and clears the days you have library science ahead of you for other work. Diligence fares very close with the next tip.

2. Staying organized is great. Being organized increases productivity manyfold and helps with accessibility. When you’re organized, things are in a more easily accessible place and decreases the amount of time looking for things, and increasing the amount of time to work, to assist people who come to the desk for help.

3. To have a patience is a good virtue to hold in this class, like many others. In library science, one works with technology more so than a regular class does. One has to be patient with the technology in order to succeed. Getting mad or frustrated when the printers don’t work doesn’t help to rectify the issue. Having patience is also necessary when looking for books. Sometimes when students are in a rush they browse past the book they need. Just taking a minute to slow down and carefully look through the books is imperative.

4. Utilize your time properly. There is a lot of time for work in this class. Utilize it to its fullest potential and most school work should be finished before you even get home.

5. Get prepared as soon as possible. If you arrive early, prepare the things that are necessary and get them ready for the upcoming block. If the library is expecting a classroom to come down, preemptively stamping bookmarks would be appropriate.

6. Learn to work as a team. When you work as a team, carrying out tasks becomes easier and takes less time. For example, if you were tasked with finding a handful of books, having classmates around who know how to help will reduce the amount of time spent looking for the books.

7. Attend all your classes. This one may seem kind of obvious but not all students heed this advice. Chances are, when you don’t come to class, you don’t end up doing anything all that productive anyways. Just coming to class gets you marks in library science. The class is 50% work experience and 50% assignments. If you come to class and show effort in your work, you will do well in this course.

8. Do things before you are asked. If there’s anything in the library that you can do, do it. If there is cardboard that needs to be recycled, recycle it ahead of time, before being told to do it. This is a good habit to get into as it gets you into a working mood and shows that you came to class eager to work.

9. A good library science student has a general understanding of the whereabouts of items. Having this information is useful because in customer interaction jobs, a worker needs to be able to help a customer easily. If a customer/student asks where a book is and you have absolutely no idea, it doesn’t look good and it takes much too long.

10. Take responsibility. If someone isn’t doing their job, it is not an excuse for you to slack off also. If they aren’t doing their job, you need to help them do it for them. Although they may have been assigned to do something, you are both in the same class and are both to blame if something isn’t finished or when something goes wrong. This is also applied in the reverse. If you slack off, you have to take responsibility and quickly finish whatever it is that you should’ve done.

In my opinion the current library science projects are already suitable and appropriate. However if something new had to be introduced, a design project might be worthwhile. However optimized the library already may be, there is always room for improvement. A possible project would be to help redesign the learning commons. Students would use some sort of application online to redesign the area into their own ideal learning commons. Explanations regarding these choices would be crucial for this project. The purpose of the design project would be to see how well students actually understand the library and the purpose that it is set up this way. If they redesign the library and everything is situated very messily, then it’s evident that the student has not understood why the current learning commons is situated the way it is.  Learning why the library is set up this way is crucial to understanding how organization works, why formatting is important, and how to make student interact with the library more fluent.

There are many ways the learning commons can be improved. One of the main things that I hear a very substantial amount of people complain about is the lack of bean bags. After the bean bags were removed from the library, there was intense complaint from students of all grades. They were there to provide a student a calming environment where they could just loosen up and get away from all the noise in the rest of the school. The bean bags were a haven that you truly felt relaxed while sitting in. Once they were removed, that tranquility was also removed and many students became deeply saddened. I’m just one of a many who is unsatisfied with this change and I hope the decision to take out the bean bags is reversed soon. Although the decision was made because the bean bags decreased productivity, I’d argue that it increased productivity. Just being able to fall down and sink into a bean bag after hours upon hours of working hard always put me in a better mood, and gave me an energy boost as I was able to relax somewhere soft after working hard.

Besides my already mentioned concern, I currently like most parts of the library. There isn’t much I’d change but there are definitely things that can be improved. The paperbacks are a little bit all over the place and I feel like they could be organized better. The surrey teens read books could be placed somewhere more easily accessible. They’re currently placed on top of the bookshelf, and I’m not sure if that’s temporary but if it is, then I think they should definitely be placed somewhere more accessible. There’s a giant television screen hanging in the library that doesn’t really do much to elevate the library experience.There are a couple ways this could be changed. We could cater what is displayed on it to be library focused. It could display frequently asked questions and answers, so as to stunt the amount of people who come up to the desk asking the same questions all the time. The television screen could display events that happen in the library and perhaps have a slideshow of daily recommended books. Anything along this general vein of thought would be great. There are many underutilized features in the library that could amount to so much more and the TV is just one of them.

Things You Know Now

A skill I learned during this course was proper customer interaction. Although this wasn’t a concern of mine beforehand, it gave me insight on what it’s like to work an interactive job. There’s a proper and an improper way to talk to people and I learned to keep it proper most of the time. Being able to plan ahead is good. You should make it so that customers don’t feel awkward and you should have an idea of what they want before they even ask for it. For example, if a student comes in asking to grab a mobile technology cart for their class, it is very beneficial to already know what to do. By knowing where things are, and understanding the steps and procedure, the process is smoothened, and interaction with the customer is easier. This is an obstacle most people face at some point in their life. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to people properly in a work environment, but it’s always something that be fixed and improved on. The first few times at the desk may be confusing, but eventually, it all comes together like clockwork.

The letter thus far has been a culmination of my experiences in this class. By taking into careful consideration the contents in this letter, you can become an extraordinary library science student too, perhaps greater than me.