Meeting students & faculty

This evening, I went to Syracuse University to a reception for the distance learning students who are on campus this week in the School of Information Studies. I traveled seven miles to the reception, but some of the student had travel across country or even further. I had wonderful conversations with three students in particular who are interesting in digitization:

• One from NYC is in a wonderful position at work where he is will be able to work on a digitization project. His thinking, I'm sure, is already far ahead of his classmates because of the environment he is in. He will likely "eat up" everything that he learns and quickly apply it to his real world situation.


• I had already met at the SLA conference a new student from Baltimore. He is interested not only in an MLS, but also in a Certification in Advance Studies in digital libraries, AND in medical librarianship. It will be interesting to hear how he combines his classes in order to learn all that he wants.


• I met a student who was in my spring 2006 class from Orange County, California. He has a background in "computers" (information technology) and now wants to move into information science. For him, the library world is still all new and still a bit mysterious, even though is more than halfway through his course work. Where are the jobs? What conferences should he attend? Can he combine his skills in information technology with his MLS? (Yes!)

I enjoyed talking about courses, possible independent studies, conferences and even consulting. These are conversations that practitioners need to have with students and new librarians. These are the conversations that can impact what they learn, how they learn it, and how the apply what they learn. These are the conversations that might change their futures. These are conversations that are too important to pass up.

BTW last week, I spent time talking with two adjunct faculty members who travel from San Francisco to Syracuse each summer to teach a one-week class on digitization. (This is the same class that I teach in the spring, but they do the three-credit class in seven consecutive days. Some people call these "suicide" classes because they are very intense and very tiring.) I met Mary Elings and Guenter Waibel after one of their long days. I had met Guenter online (blogs and e-mail) and so was looking forward to meeting him in person. What a joy to be able talk about work and teaching with two people whose viewpoints are broadly similar to mine. Again, this was an opportunity I could not pass up. It was too important to share information and stories with them. I look forward to doing it again, if not with them, then with other people who are deeply involved in understanding and teaching about digital assets.

---

Technorati tags: Digitization, Digital libraries, Syracuse