Jed B’s Library Student Blog Homepage 🏡

“Whoa, what’s this? A blog, huh? Tell me what it’s about!”

<aside> 💡

Hi there! My name is Jed 🙂. I have been studying about Libraries at a vocational college (TAFE) in Australia, and have decided to make a blog to share my ideas & discoveries!

</aside>

I believe that Libraries are wonderful places - special spaces that lie somewhere between the comfy leisure of a home 🛋️ and the communal learning of a school 🧠, and which come alive as people flow in and out of the doors or as books circulate from shelves, just like a beating heart at the center of a lively community 💓 (though that may just be my background as a science grad talking haha 👨‍🔬🔬🧬).

The opportunity arose for me to enrol in a library studies course, so I took it! I want to find out more Libraries, how they operate as organisations, and perhaps even work within one someday.

A major feature of this blog will be a database collection of library-related book reviews (’Jed’s Library Book Review Database’ 📚), scored in a (semi-) quantitative manner with some level of rigor, along with some brief subjective commentary. Not all books are created equally, unfortunately and some are less practicable or helpful than their covers and blurbs would lead a reader to believe.

Other features include some aspects about Library knowledge that I think are worth reflecting on , such as learning library classification systems 🗃️ in a fun and mind-friendly manner, a section on Manga 🇯🇵 since it’s a unique format type that I have been engaging with for many years (if I ever work in a Library, I’d like to contribute to managing the manga collection) and another one on Reference (yet another intriguing collection area), and an aggregation of useful resources and support groups for library students 🆘 that can provide some help and guidance beyond the limits of the classroom, which also has a dedicated page containing tips for studying at TAFE💡, (Update: the following sections were created after typing up this intro spiel), an online portfolio with samples of my work 💼👩🏻‍💻 for the TAFE library course assessments, a series of musings into related topics 🤔💭that I felt interested in at some time or another, and a page containing some of the soundtracks that provide musical ambience 🎶 when working on this blog. There is a sitemap 🗺️ blog page, but sometime after creating it, I figured out how to use synced blocks in notion (the ‘Blog Navigation 🧭’ pane) that fulfill the same purpose and do not need to be incessantly updated, so the sitemap is now obsolete.

If there is anything in particular in this blog that you are looking for or want to know more about, try using the search function near the top of the page and type in some keywords 🔎.

This blog is best viewed on a desktop with a widescreen monitor 🖥️✅. The intended formatting may not display properly on a smartphone📱 with a vertical aspect ratio or tablet computer.

For another blog related to learning about libraries, visit Librarianship Studies and Information Technology which is packed with detailed knowledge of the discipline.

In case you are living or are otherwise interested in Sydney 🦘, go check out Biblioburbia: The Library Files created by Vanessa Berry to see her superb blog that chronicles her visits of the public libraries throughout Sydney!