As part of Hack Library School’s Library Student Day in the Life, a look at library students’ days around the world from October 28 – November 1, I am blogging about my week! I am a student at San Jose State University, an online program, getting my Masters in Library and Information Science. My focus is on youth librarianship. Today I woke up late and had another tough day in terms of getting work done. I talked with my sister on Skype, a musician who lives in Sweden for a while, updated my website (I hadn't updated my plugins or Wordpress in a loooooong time and it was being janky, and as I'm going to the California Library Association Conference this weekend I wanted to make sure all my networking parts were working right.

Then I did some more emailing about a cool internship I'm hoping to do next semester, in which I would be working with Oakland Public Library's teen outreach librarian to do some creative programming and outreach for the Youth Poet Laureate Program. So awesome. Then I did some more emailing with a professor about meeting her at the conference for breakfast, and responded to a couple discussion board posts before going off to work.

At work today, I was pleased to see that students had written on my participatory display about citizenship! Hurrah! So I worked to document it, talked about next steps with my supervisor, and then checked out books and shelved and prettied up the space before heading down to help out with a Kindergarten and 2nd grade class and hang up new Dewey icons I had designed to help kids find things easier in the library.

Then I went rock-climbing with my partner, had dinner with my dad, carved pumpkins with my neighbors, and am now settled in at 11:24 pm with some schoolwork before and after me. I posted a quick discussion post about graphic novels for my Materials for Tweens class (the questions were: Where are graphic novels shelved at your local public library? Are they in the Young Adult area, or the children's area, or both? Will Tweens find them easily? Or, are the shelved in the Dewey number (741)? Does the library have Graphic Novels for younger Tweens or just for teenagers?).

Then I turned to my Hyperlinked Library class, where I was reading about QR codes, smartphones, and storytime. All totally interesting topics: lots of information that I try to read, incorporate into what I know and what I hope to do, and try to remember. I do a lot of bookmarking and copying and pasting interesting quotes into Word documents to refer to later in discussion and blog posts.

I also spent today reflecting on my meeting yesterday with my group at the Emerging Arts Professionals network. It was my first meeting in a group of artists where I was presenting myself as a librarian, and I found it incredibly refreshing. I was able to bring ideas from librarianship and school that I am totally excited about - access to free information, presented in user-friendly ways, and archived for long-term use - into a creative and inspiring setting (libraries are also creative and inspiring, but everyone expects artists to be so). I was feeling very validated in my choice to pursue librarianship, even as the Fear works its way into my heart as my graduation approaches and I hear horror stories about job hunting. I get my business cards in the mail on Halloween so I am excited to be passing those out at the conference this weekend, where I will be blogging!