A wobbly stool

The first year of library school has come and gone. So now I have three months to spend actually thinking and learning about libraries. Unfortunately, during my time spent in school so far, the topic of libraries hasn’t come up all that often.

I did learn a lot this year–it’s just that I didn’t learn much of it in my classes. The knowledge I’ve gained from professional experience, outside reading, and involvement in extracurricular activities has been far more interesting and relevant than most of what I’ve had to spend time on in class.

There have been a few highlights from the first year, my classes with Deborah Jacobs (director of the Seattle Public Library) and Nancy Pearl (is there anyone who doesn’t know who Nancy Pearl is?) being chief among them. One thing that’s stuck with me from Nancy’s class is her characterization of librarianship as a “three-legged stool”: the information/technology leg, the reader’s advisory leg, and the programming leg. If this is true, then 95% of my classes so far have been focused on one leg. That’s a pretty wobbly stool.