Students in Library and Information Science (and recent grads and friends)
Ingbert Floyd's Discussions
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Started this discussion. Last reply by GULELAAT Nov. 26, 2008.
Ingbert Floyd's Page
Profile Information
- School:
- Graduate School of Library and Information Science (duh) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
- Web address:
- http://ingbert.org
- Expected graduation:
- Um, the near future, I hope...
- Employer:
- Graduate School of Library and Information Science (duh) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
- Favorite class:
- Rapid Prototyping and Evaluation
- Tell us something about yourself:
- I'm a PhD student in LIS (I'm assuming us faculty-bound types are welcome here?), and my area of study is social informatics. While my passion is developing ways to improve the design and understanding of sociotechnical systems, my hobby is thinking about and discovering issues in formal ontologies and other knowledge representation frameworks. But I have to focus on one thing if I ever want to graduate, so I don't know as much about the formal ontology stuff as I'd like.
In case you're wondering, "What the heck is a sociotechnical system?", the answer is easy: every environment in which human activity occurs. The next obvious question is, "If sociotechnical systems are everything, then why don't you just say 'stuff'?" Well, because saying 'sociotechnical' means that when conceptualizing 'stuff' I understand that what we do in our daily activities is a complex mesh of interactions between individuals and their environment, and to understand that what goes on in any particular environment involves studying a whole host of different things: not just the social (policy, culture, cultural norms, power relations), not just the technological (both computing and analog technology), but also building layout, geography, individual preferences, etc.
In case you're wondering, "what do sociotechnical systems have to do with LIS?", think about this. All Libraries are sociotechnical systems. In fact, every use of information occurs within a sociotechnical system. Therefore studying information behavior requires studying activity within a sociotechnical system. To me, it seems like it might be a good idea to study what happens in the system as a whole, in order to better understand the factors that motivate, enable and constrain the actions of any particular individual who is acting within the system. In essence, I believe I'm trying to do what Bernd Frohmann ( http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/home.html ) suggests in his latest book "Deflating Information" (which I'm still working my way through), which is to emphasize the study of documents (or information objects) and what people do with them. I just generalize this activity to include the whole system in which this behavior occurs.
- Any other degrees?
- B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Science
- Why did you choose library science?
- Because it's cool. I've been interested in sociotechnical systems and their design and construction for a long time, but I didn't have these words to describe my interests. I wasn't able to get a job that used my degree when I graduated with my B.S. (cognitive scientists with B.S.'s weren't in great demand outside the laboratory, surprise, surprise), and I was getting tired of living paycheck to paycheck, and decided to try to go back to school (again--I had run out of money the last time). I wanted a job that would pay a decent amount (I had been making $8,000/year, so my standards weren't too high), and which I could actually find, and I figured, there are libraries all over, and not *that* many people want to be a librarian, so I should be able to find something.
Well, I started looking at LIS school webpages, and I started realizing all the really cool things that Librarians study and do, and I thought to myself, "heck, this is so interesting I could easily do a PhD in this stuff!" And so I applied, got in, and here I am. While my focus is on social informatics and knowledge representation, I find nearly every aspect of the field fascinating, including children's literature and youth services, indexing and abstracting, thesaurus construction, etc.
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