!experience, schmerience!!

[Elisabeth Roche]

I know I am a librarian (it's genetic-)), and I wanted to be trained. I
brought to the plate a European convent school education, a psychology
degree, advanced course work in History of Science, Special Education
Behavioral Disorders, periodicals bindery clerk, ten years as a circulation
assistant, then fulfillment manager for non-profits, then profits, and then
circulation manager of a consumer magazine.

Was this enough?

I went into LIS as a non-degree student, August 1994, hoping to change
status after all paperwork was filed. I was requested by a techie teacher to
be his independent study student the next semester running the computer lab
because of my expertise. And I loved tutoring the students too.

So, what was the outcome? 

Nada. 

I was not accepted to the LIS school I requested admittance to. I believe
this was an error in judgement, with negative ramifications to me, and also
to the LIS Department and continues to perpetuate stereotypes concerning
people like me, coming in from fields that may not "sound" like a librarian.

I did the math for ten years in direct mail and magazine circulation.

But it didn't help me become a trained librarian, not yet anyway!!

Elisabeth Roche ace at opus1.com


---fwd partial comments- thread that made me speak my
mind-----------------------

At 07:54 PM 12/1/95 -0800, Karen G. Schneider wrote:
>>A last comment about librarians.  I would expect vast amounts of solid
>>research findings about how humans interact with information and information
>>systems to be flowing out of our schools of library science. And of course
>>not much is . . . Why is this?  Have we attracted too many humanities types
>>into the programs?  People weak in mathematical skills?  It's 1995, for
>>heaven's sake -- by now we should have had mountains of verifiable
>>findings about how people and interfaces interact. Stuff we could use
>>in designing systems. Stuff we could give to programmers and not force
>>them to flail about.
>
>Joe, thank you--you've changed the thread from the programmers vs. the
>librarians to the humanities majors versus the math majors.  Certainly a
>start.
>