Filling in the Spaces

Chovanec, Anna; Haynes, Carl C.; Maust, Katrina

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78071 Copy

Description

Title

Filling in the Spaces

Author(s)

• Chovanec, Anna
• Haynes, Carl C.
• Maust, Katrina

Issue Date

2015-04-11

Keyword(s)

Library and information science education

Abstract

This presentation will introduce the ongoing student-led program “Filling in the Spaces” (FiTS) at Syracuse University. This program treats the library school environment and experience as a human library in itself, responding to the immediate educational and informational needs of students in an “all-hands-on-deck” way. Organized and supported by the Library and Information Science Student Assembly at SU (LISSA), FiTS maintains a living document of student interests, informational needs, and gaps in the curriculum, matching them with other students who are able to provide instruction or support in each area. LISSA then facilitates an informal presentation or instruction session (live-streamed and recorded) for distribution to the rest of the student body and alumni. LISSA recognizes that, as library students, many of us have extensive backgrounds and personal passions in very diverse fields. We also recognize that library school is short and, sometimes, we need to divide and conquer. We converse with one another both across the classroom and across the world while maintaining full-time jobs and even starting from the ground up in a new profession. This makes taking advantage of the here-and-now particularly challenging. Working to establish each member of our student community as a resource, the FiTS program has helped us forge more meaningful, expertise-driven relationships with classmates, our de-facto professional network. We see the potential for this program to knit the fabric of our community a little more tightly, as well as help us engage with and mine the wealth of knowledge and experience among our online classmates. Given the limited opportunities for pre-professional opportunities, FiTS also provides a platform for students to acquire valuable presentation and instruction experience in a self-directed and impactful way. The value of a program like FiTS is in its unique ability to help bridge the gap between being classmates and becoming colleagues, while driving student inquiry, boosting engagement, and enhancing the LIS community at SU. Perhaps most importantly, FiTS provides us with an avenue for immediate educational enhancement on our terms, while faculty wrestle with making long-term changes to curricula to meet the transforming requirements of the LIS field.

Series/Report Name or Number

Proceedings of the 2015 Symposium on LIS Education

Type of Resource

other

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78071

Copyright and License Information

Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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