Friday, October 25, 2013

What are Primary and Secondary Sources -- A Select Sample

Library guides (LibGuides Community Site) provide resources to understand the question of what is primary (original work) and what is secondary (review, criticism, etc.). A sample is given here to help a beginner and anyone who needs a lead:
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES   Source: http://selu.libguides.com
Primary Source
Secondary Sources
Novel, poem
Literary criticism
Diary, autobiography
Biography
Letters, historical documents, oral testimony
Historical Commentary
Newspaper report
Editorial
Raw data from questionnaires
Observation/experiment
Scientific article
Television show/film
Review
Interview
Case study
"A primary source is any work that offers ORIGINAL intellectual content: artistic works, diaries, newpaper reports witnessed by a participant from the time of the event, memoirs, speeches, government reports & statistics, artifacts.

Primary sources generally serve as foundation material for a particular subject area. They are the result of someone doing primary research, which involves collecting raw data. Primary sources allow researchers to analyze the data or object for themselves in order to come up with alternate theories and opinions.
Secondary sources interpret and analyze primary sources. In other words, when a writer looks at a primary document, and produces a work that tries to make sense of what he or she finds, the result is a secondary study or secondary source." Adapted from:
Kirszner, Laurie G. The Holt Handbook. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2002.

Samples from Library Guides:

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Culture and Technology - A select annotated list

PS. This is a continuously updated list, last updated Oct 10, 2013.
On the same shelf:

Monday, September 23, 2013

How to Talk About Your Weaknesses in a Job Interview

Info courtesy: ALA JobLIST shared a link.

How to Talk About Your Weaknesses in a Job Interview, By 

Bottomline: In other words, talk about the weakness and talk about how you're controlling it. Continue reading

Monday, September 09, 2013

Forthcoming Conferences and Professional Development Opportunities

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Most underpaid, overeducated occupations

Most underpaid, overeducated occupations

Detroit Free Press-Sep 4, 2013
The median annual income of library technicians in 2012 was about $30,000. The bottom 10% earned $18,430 or less. Library technicians are ...

on the same shelf:

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Librarian's (LIS) career inside—or outside—jobs in the traditional library setting: Hype or Hope???

This blog is updated regularly, last updated 14 Oct, 2014

Ps. The billion dollar question: Is the LIS profession saturated? If they say, NOPE. Then see the frustration, shock and the rest in the stories below; compare with the responses / hopes / dreams in the next section (other side...):

One side of the story (i.e., the new graduates and those who have completed LIS, but have no leads), Library and information science (LIS) career:
Other side of the Story (i.e., the LIS Schools, policy makers, academics, proponents, etc. who are involved in the programs?):
On the same shelf:
  •  Assessment Skills and the Academic Library Job Market 
  • Most underpaid, overeducated occupations
  • 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Accepting a Job Offer You Don’t Love, By Heather Huhman    [Re: Wonder is this true in this age and time, of challenges that were never so many? I am not sarcastic. Aren't there applications in dozens for each post (are we still having the luxury of choosers, with malice towards none)? Aren't there shortage of opportunities? Aren't there highly specialized jobs that you need to be picking without love/hate formula?]
  • The Countries You May Like to Go with your American / Canadian MLIS - A literature survey
  •  Factors in success or failure of foreign-trained librarians in Canada
  • "The evaluation of international credentials and the hiring of internationally trained librarians in Canadian academic and public libraries, Keren Dali and Juris Dilevkoa, The International Information & Library Review Volume 41, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 146-162:
    "This study examines the way in which libraries in Canada approach the issue of the evaluation of international credentials (ICs) held by internationally trained librarians (ITLs) and the eventual short-listing and hiring of such individuals. In the United States and Canada, librarianship, a non-regulated profession, is to a large degree governed by the American Library Association (ALA), but the ALA's statements regarding ICs and ITLs are often ambiguous. It is therefore frequently left to individual libraries to decide how best to deal with ICs and ITLs"