Looking at the Socialization of LIS Students
Through a Pop Culture Lens

This is a little bit of self-promotion, but the fun kind! A few years ago my research partner and I wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns; but we had very demanding jobs that required us to be working all the time. So we had to work out a way to make watching Buffy into work.

Reader, we did it.

We both like pop culture, and as professors we frequently used pop culture images and ideas to illustrate points in library work. Students would identify with pop culture material, and use it to help incorporate the ideas we were discussing in class into their own professional images they were developing.

We wanted to find out how common this was, so we did a survey of library students across the country to find out what kinds of pop culture images they like, that they shared with others, and were using in their professional development. You can flip through our article to see what all we found; one of the biggies was how very cool students are, and how much pop culture they knew!

Libraries, as well as archives and museums and other information-focused professions, are very well represented across all sorts of pop culture images and ideas. So be proud, and seize your own professional identity ideas from the wide range of pop culture images out there!