Done Already: LBSC 751's Final

Most of my peers who already have or are currently working towards graduate degrees in a humanities field decided to take one of the many of the information access courses other than LBSC 751: Information Access in the Humanities this past semester. They gave sound explanations that had to do with diversifying their courses to increase their employability. Their logic gave me pause about pursing this course. However, after reflecting on my purpose for earning an MLS I decided that LBSC 751 would be a good fit for me this semester.

I blogged about my reasons for earning an MLS in my post DH is a Service. I appreciated starting the semester off with an introduction to Digital Humanities since this is such a significant way of accessing humanities information. In the future DH projects have the potential to be some of the best cultural heritage resources for humanities information seekers. Though I will admit to being dismayed and confounded by classmates who had no clue what DH is and thought that learning about it was a waste of time. Not everyone here decided to earn an MLS because they want to work in Digital Humanities or chose UMD's iSchool because of its collaboration with MITH (crazy talk I know).

When I signed up for this class I wasn’t anticipating the course spending as much time as it did on scholarly publishing in the humanities, a silly oversight on my part. I ended up finding the range of publication mediums exciting and a little overwhelming. While there is still a place for peer-reviewed journal articles and university press monographs the variety of open access journals, digital repositories, blogs, digital books, and conference proceedings (via slide share, you tube, & twitter) are a significant series of resources. I was only able to begin looking at some of these with my blog post How Should Scholars Publish in a Digital Age.

I appreciated the more traditional assignments as well. The subject area presentations provided many useful resources and a few potential research ideas (as if I don’t already have enough of my plate). I really enjoyed responding to Tim Hackman’s sample reference questions in Victorian Pseudoscience is Super Fun. Actually the successes and struggles that I had answering the question made me feel like there might be a place for me in the Digital Humanities after all. I’m glad that I stuck with my first response and enrolled in LBSC 751: Information Access in the Humanities this semester.