information professionals

by

Study Visit Report – A Reflection

The 2021 CSU Virtual Study Visit has provided many opportunities for an insight into the possibilities the profession of an information specialist presents.

The two main areas of my personal enrichment that this visit has provided me with were:

  • learning about the specialisations which I knew very little of before; and
  • looking at what other school librarians, working in a library comparable to my own, include in their work and their way of dealing with some common issues in our field.

Due to my own background as a primary school librarian, I had previously not given much thought to other opportunities within the field and it was certainly an eye-opening experience to discover the world beyond school and public libraries. Special libraries, like health, law and orchestra libraries were completely new to me, while an archive/museum library presentation offered a window into a very complex world of resource preservation. The key learning point was that the special librarians are experts in search retrieval, they understand the context of a subject, not its content (Griffith, personal communication, August 31, 2021). It is therefore our transferrable skills as information specialists that can make it possible to move between different information agencies.

As a librarian dealing with staffing issues, it was particularly important for me to learn that although the Teacher Librarian services encompass many aspects, we will never be able to “do it all” and therefore personalization and customization is necessary (Godfree, personal communication, September 3, 2021). A realization significant to my own practice came from the words of Di Ruffles, who stressed the importance of being pro-active and getting parents and students on our side, as they are the best advocates for school libraries (Ruffles, personal communication, September 7, 2021).

I am grateful for the option of a virtual study visit – it was an invaluable experience for me as an international student, bringing a wealth of information, new experiences and sense of real connection to the world of information professionals.