How I Spent my Summer Vacation

In June, I attended the first weekend Institute for the UNT IMLS distance independent PhD program. We spent the weekend getting to know each other, the faculty and generally freaking because of how new this academic experience was to all of us. After that weekend, we were responsible for completing 3 courses for a total of 9 credit hours online.

The ladies in the cohort are neat folks. I enjoyed every minute we spent together. We are diverse but I recognize the passion for library stuff in all of us.

Statistics was a rollercoaster of ?I can?t do this.? To ?Wow. This makes sense.? I must recommend the book to all of you: Vaughn?s Statistics for the Information Professional should be in every librarian?s personal collection if you deal with any type of number crunching.

We used a program called R to run statistical reports on the survey I wrote about here and then we were to write assignments of data analyses for 6 different types of information. Scatterplots?Chi Square?and Histograms oh my! We were set to have a series of online quizzes over the book but our professor waived them because of our great work on the assignments!

Another class was devoted to an introduction to the discipline of Information Science. We read some cool stuff and responded to each other?s thoughts via an online posting system. I really got into it and the members of the cohort blow me away with their intelligence.

The third class was to start reading and thinking about our research interests. Online communication ?such as blogs ? and the building of 21st century libraries fascinate me. I have made some good contacts as well out in the field?folks that have advised me and pointed me in some useful directions.

Eight weeks flew by while I did these classes? Most of it was spent up north where I found I got a ton of work done uninterrupted ? except for the boys who kept me distracted and made me remember to get out and walk them.

We return to Denton a week from today to start our next semester: 7 hours. I am reading our next text for class Information Tasks by Bryce Allen. It seems pretty cool: usability, users needs, etc etc.