Classes at IUPUI

Dear fellow SLIS Bloomington Students,

Having just finished my adventures into IUPUI's SLIS, I have a few bits of advice.

1. IUPUI offers classes online, yay!
2. My classes were a bit harder than the ones I've taken at Bloomington (perhaps because they were online and you can't get participation points for showing up and because it's summer, which means cramming 16 weeks into 6)
3. Turns out they offer 3 credit hour workshops, such as the Grant Writing one I took (once I figured out it was 3 credit hours, the extra amount of work made more sense), but remember you can only take 6 credit hours of workshops for credit towards your degree...
   
4. You can take up to six credit hours at IUPUI without a whole lot of paperwork (although, you do have to pay campus fees there as well as the ones you pay at Bloomington)
   
5. IUPUI is one week behind Bloomington, so this week I was completing my finals for IUPUI while starting new classes at Bloomington
   
6. If you want to take classes there, ask Rhonda!

I hope this is useful information to a few of you!

The World of GIS

In a conversation with one of my professors last semester, I was advised that I might be interested in taking the GIS workshop this summer. As a visual type person and a lover of maps I was excited to learning this software. Besides, I've heard that GIS is being used in many different contexts and that it is a skill that is in demand. So, sign me up.

What is GIS you might ask? Well, GIS or Geographic Information Systems is a system that captures, stores, and manages geographically referenced data. It is used in many contexts such as city planning, cartography, remote sensing, environmental management, natural resources, and even search engines. The possibilities are limitless. In the age of Google maps we take the role of accurate maps and geospatial data for granted, but so many industries are in need of professionals who are comfortable navigating their way through huge sets of information and displaying it in a way that "makes sense." For many, that's in a map in some form or another.

If you are interested in database or systems administration and data analysis this might be something you might want to look into. ESRI is a great starting place for more info on opportunities:
http://www.esri.com/what-is-gis/index.html.

Service!

Dear Fellow Slizzardians,

As a future librarian, most of us are aware of the importance of service. For those of you who may be less familiar, as an academic librarian (and in some other areas of library science) you are expected to participate in service at many levels: community (both school and location), state, national, and international. Service is one of the ways librarians are evaluated professionally.

One way to begin your service journey is to first join a student organization (the SLA-SG is always an excellent choice). Another way to at least get familiar with an organization is through its listserv. Librarians are big fans of things like social media, blogs, and listservs because it is the easiest way to communicate. Figure out what types of librarianship you may be interested, whether it is community colleges or archives or any other area, investigate the organization's parent/national website, and join its listserv. Most listservs do not require you to be a paying member, and it will give you an idea of what people in that field are frequently working on or discussing. Sometimes, you may even find out about jobs!

Another great advantage of listservs is that you can find out about workshops and conferences. I recently attended a workshop on the Care and Identification of Photographs (Gawain Weaver) and I learned a ton. I also had the opportunity to meet/network with other librarians in a field I was interested in on a much more intimate level than if it had been a conference.