The Library Chronicles: Choosing a Concentration

Hello, and welcome to my new feature about library school and librarianship, The Library Chronicles! With this feature, I hope to discuss things I've learned from and about library school and share my experiences working in libraries to help out other library newbies. Today, I want to talk about why it's okay if you don't know what you want your concentration to be right when you enter library school.

I think most people probably think you have to and probably do know what concentration they're going into when they go to grad school. College is often seen as the time to explore what you want to do, especially in liberal arts land, but by grad school, you're definitely expected to have things figured out. I think the advice about grad school I got that was the most confusing to me was just to go and worry about what to study later. I never thought I would go to grad school right after college for financial reasons, but when it turned out my family had the financial resources to send me, I knew I wanted to go to library school because all the library jobs I looked at when I was getting ready to graduate college required an MLS.

Disclaimer: I knew I wanted to work in youth services and work in public libraries when I applied to library school. I planned to take the public libraries concentration with electives in youth services and programming and for a semester, that is what I did. But then something weird happened.

I'll admit I was not looking forward to taking Information and Communications Technology when I looked at the course name. Prior to library school, technology had not been my strongest skill and I was very nervous about taking a whole course in it. I figured I would struggle to get through and get by with a B and then brush the memory of the class away from my mind forever.

However, that's not what happened. Through this required course, I learned about community informatics, a new-ish field of information science that focuses on empowering communities through the use of technology. I ended up loving the course, and the professor became my chosen advisor for the rest of my time in library school. When she sent out an email about community informatics being added as a concentration to the library graduate school, I knew instantly I wanted to change my concentration, even though I knew I still wanted to work mainly with youth services populations.

Changing concentrations was a great decision, because I got to learn about working with a variety of populations and became much more comfortable with the use of a variety of technologies. I was able to do community informatics but put most of my work in the context of teen and children populations while gaining other skills that would help me work with other populations as well.

The point is, even if you think you know exactly what you want to study when you enter library school, don't write off any courses and stay open to the possibility that you may discover a different field that allows you to expand upon your interests in whatever you may start out in. And, if you know you want to go to library school but aren't set on a concentration yet, that's okay too, because you'll be sure to take a course that inspires an interest in a particular field or population.

Basically: be open when you go to library school. Don't rule something out because you think you won't be good at it or won't need it in your particular field. Explore fields and types of libraries outside of your own, and maybe you'll discover a passion for something you hadn't even known existed before.