MA Librarianship

Sheffield induction folder I took my MA in Librarianship at the University of Sheffield Department of Information Studies. As I finished my PhD I decided I wanted to work in academia, but not as an academic. Research librarianship seemed to involve all the aspects of academia I loved, with none of the downsides.

Sheffield is a well-respected library school (it was rated top Library and Information Management school in the RAE in 2008) and I successfully obtained AHRC Professional Preparation funding to undertake the course.

A little bit more information about studying librarianship can be found on the Guardian's website in a piece on Master's courses for which I was interviewed. There are also more links to information about library and information studies courses available on my blogroll.

As this course was my third postgraduate experience I was determined to get as much from it as possible, so I enthusiastically applied for opportunities and got involved whenever I could. My biggest successes on this front were receiving funded places at the Research Libraries UK Conference (details of award here) in October 2008, LILAC (the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference, report here) in March / April 2009 and Mashed Library in July 2009.

I also featured in a report on the RLUK conference in CILIP's Library and Information Update, January/February 2009 issue and I am a new professionals representative on the Yorkshire and Humberside Career Development Group, and was involved in organising a careers discussion evening for Librarianship and Information Management students in February 2009.

The MA Librarianship features core modules in management, information literacy, information retrieval and libraries in society. and I also took optional modules on academic and special libraries, electronic publishing and educational informatics. My dissertation looked at evaluating the Information Commons - Sheffield's 2007 library / computing facility, more details of which can be found on my Information Commons study page or on my blog under the dissertation tag.