If you are new to graduate school we expect you to be in shock soon. If you are not new to graduate school but new to library studies, you might wisely prepare yourself to work harder and longer, and with more ambiguity, than in your previous graduate degree program. We expect you to be entirely ready for an extraordinary level of engagement and intense study about information as a phenomenon, process, and product. No matter what your previous experience in school, with the possible exception of philosophy, you have probably not experienced courses centered on so invisible, so subtle, and yet so ubiquitous a topic as information.
Here are some things we expect as a faculty:
We find that well-informed students are likely to become better informed by spending time where the information is. No modem in so powerful that you will be able to phone in your entire thirty-six credits. So be prepared to spend extraordinary amounts of time in the presence of information, typically in the library, certainly in the computer laboratory, sleepily in the graduate reserve reading room, spacily on the Internet and, sometimes exhaustedly, in your own little domestic cell surrounded by photocopies, coffee, and Oreos.
Whatever you spent on books this term, expect to spend a similar amount on your photocopy budget. You will be responsible for creating your own personal information system of documentation and citation during your courses. Plan to invest in pencil boxes, multicolored cards, pens, disks, and all of the other gear that you will need to keep track of the journey.
Keeping track of the journey will be best accomplished by using a diary or some other device to talk to yourself about the kind of librarian or information specialist you see yourself becoming. It is really important to challenge yourself throughout this program, especially to discover the ways that will cause your experiences to have coherence and value as only you can, from your own point of view. I will encourage you to talk to yourself and your companions constantly about what you think these professions are good for, or what you want to discover for yourself in them, or ... what you want to have happen during the rest of your lives. As usual, you must think about your destiny for yourself. This is the first step toward becoming what Donald Schon calls a "reflective practitioner," and, as I say, no one here is going to help you to do this more than you will yourself.
You should prepare your spouses, life companions and significant others for a strange and deep immersion throughout this program. (Think of those anthropologists who live among native peoples in remote parts of the world, and think especially of those who, through passion or design, become members of the tribes they study and you may just about understand this process correctly. Your lovers and friends may first notice the change as you learn to speak the language: virtual reality; bibliographic citation; cognitive authority. When you start using cognitive authority in conversation there is no hope. You are lost to the real world forever.)
I believe that change is a cognitive environment, constructed by the questions you ask. When your questions are done, the change is done. Those who change best - most powerfully and most profoundly - in my experience are those who ask the best questions, ask them often, and allow the answers to evolve over a long time. This is another way to trace your journey through a diary: How do your questions change over time?
The immersion I mentioned may not only mean time spent in Alexander Library and the Library of Science and Medicine, or at Douglass and Kilmer Area Libraries, but in your own town library, nearby town and county libraries, and university libraries as well. At times, you may have to seek access to school and special libraries, and to libraries in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
As you are asked to spend time in libraries and information centers, you might want to develop some good general working criteria for understanding the services you are receiving, the professional work you are observing, and the kinds of libraries you see yourself working in. We can provide only one side of your professional training. Increasingly, it will help you in every way to think of yourself in the situations you are observing. In some cases, you will be there in a year. So it is important to become a critical thinker about information practice as you experience it from a user's point of view. You will not have the luxury of thinking of yourself as a library user for much longer.
By the way, though this may have changed, you should not expect a lot of loving sympathy from working librarians as you complete your tasks. Be as independent as you can be, ask them for help only if you must. And then be brief, and then be grateful.
In every class, look around for companions. Not just pals for complaining and whining -- not that there ever will be anything to complain or whine about -- but look for a survival system of comrades and critical thinkers, who can help each other to make sense out of tasks and expectations here. On a practical level you need to construct a mutually beneficial system for keeping on track, and for working together on collaborative projects in the library stacks or computer lab. Be assured, this will make a critical difference in the quality of your experience in the MLS program.
This sounds simple, but it is nearly impossible to do, yet I will give you this following advice anyway. Find out early what will be required of you for the term and set a schedule for yourself. Obviously, our assignments require heavy library time and heavy documentation at the end of the term, and one needs to have only two courses with significant research to have a major conflict.
Speaking for myself as a professor, deadlines are negotiable when a heavy week is coming up, but not all of my colleagues are as gentle, gracious and sweet as I am, so clarify the policies of your instructors regarding late and incomplete work. Incompletes are useful but dangerous. First, they permit you to get work done in a more thoughtful way when things get crowded. Second, they also permit the second semester to begin before the work for the first semester is over, so they allow you to work in two semesters at once, which you should avoid at all costs. An incomplete at the end of a term is a total loss a year later, so if you must take an incomplete, give it attention right away, as soon as other pressing courses are dealt with. Incompletes are last resorts, not conveniences. We also use something called the temporary grade, appearing as a T followed by a grade (E.g., TC) on your transcript. If this is not rectified within the following semester, the T is dropped and you receive the indicated grade as part of your permanent record. The news gets worse: The faculty has also approved a policy that prevents the registration of any student with two or more provisional grades.
So: What other advice can I give, except: SUBMIT YOUR PAPERS ON TIME. When you cannot, I urge you to make a deal with the instructor about a new deadline. Then, on the original due date, provide the instructor with a promissory note or a reminder, to keep everyone mindful that something is coming. On the whole, your faculty will be generous, if you respect their deadlines and situations as well as your own. These communications are marks of integrity.
Speaking of integrity, there is absolutely nothing that is more important here, and we have a special interest in it because we library school professors are what might be called footnote-fetishists. We footnote nerds live and breathe for accurate citations, thorough documentation, and perfect bibliographic form. We assume that you will know how to do this without our devoting much attention to it, so place it high and early on your agendas to understand what we want in written work. I have developed the practice of noting appropriate style manuals in my course outlines. But you should be particular about identifying the styles of citation and documentation that your instructors refer.
Three important basic guides to bibliographic citation and documentation are The Chicago Manual of Style, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and the style manual published by the Modern Language Association. These are comprehensive, professional and ubiquitous. Other style manuals may be preferred, but the three I mentioned are basic items, stocked in virtually every reference room and relatively easy to use. If you can afford it, anticipate the all-night word-processing that is likely to occur, and buy or borrow copies of the manuals you will need most.
Speaking of citations and documentation obviously one of the hallmarks of an excellent university -- and of course you understand that you are now students in an excellent university -- is how explicitly it values academic integrity. It pleases me to tell you that Rutgers University very clearly emphasizes that honesty and accuracy are integral to the construction of knowledge. Ethical behavior is simply part of the community ethos, fundamental to everything we do here and absolutely essential to your presence here.
You are preparing yourselves not simply to be competent practitioners, but to create some of the most important, most authentic events in the lives of learners, moments when they come face to face with new information and must make critical decisions about how they are going to respond to it. You will be more than a witness and more than a mere functionary in these events, you will be their mediator, their designer, and in a real sense their co-creator. They will not happen without you and this, to me, is what will make you professional. Consequently, there is no more important quality than the quality of trust that people will bring to you. Every act you do assures the recipient "Trust this information." And by implication, "Trust me".
This sort of integrity is the kind of giving that surrounds the gift, the quality of yourself that you give when you assist the learners in your community toward informed change. Of course it is also the kind of gift that stays with you, the more you give it away, because it is part of your professional identity. That fabric of integrity stays when you have given information away well, which is to say fittingly and fully, at the right moment in another's need.
So we who teach you have more than perfunctory or casual or simply scholarly interests in your integrity as inquirers and students. Your professional work as a librarian is integral and identical with accuracy and honesty. We assume its presence in all of your work and consider it to be essential in all of the work that will follow your MLS degree. Further, we will be disappointed in ourselves as teachers if you do not come to share this assumption deeply and, with us, strive to live up to it.
Every great institution is an institution that is not simply for its users or for its community or for its students. If we are to be what we want to be -- and of course what you want us to be -- we must be an institution that is with you as well as for you. Which is simply to say: All of us, teachers and learners, create our integrity, our competence, and our authority by being with each other in this intellectual enterprise.
However, speaking for the faculty, please remember that we are educators and so it is our responsibility to cause some trouble in your lives. We are actually paid to cause this trouble for you. Who pays us to do this? In fact, you are paying us to cause this trouble for you! So thank you for this opportunity, and welcome to graduate study, where we of the faculty are delighted to cause a great deal of trouble not just for you, but with you as well.
Finally, the best advice at last: If you have not done so already, you had better come to think of yourself as an adult independent learner, leading an unfinished life, ready to construct an experience that will change the way you think forever. Please let me be the first to assure you that you will soon discover that you are, in the words of Jules Henry, more capable than you think you are, and more ready than you know to enter the cognitive environments of information.
Your teachers wish you the very best life -- the most promising, most engaging and most challenging, most informing life you can lead.
Of the style manuals mentioned above, most faculty prefer the APA manual [Ref BF76.7.P82 and Reserve]. You will also need to refer to 'Electronic References (American Psychological Association), which you can reach from http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu, by following the path Research Resources-->Electronic Reference Sources-->Citation Manuals. There you will also find a number of other guides to citation formats.
A Web site that you might find useful is http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu. See also Rutgers Libraries' Web site under Library Instruction and Tutorials.
Please be sure you are familiar with expectations in regard to attributing sources and other aspects of guarding integrity, as laid out in Rutgers policy, http://ctaar.rutgers.edu/integrity/policy.html.