Information science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A man came to the library help desk last spring looking for a book about canal boats his father had read to him as a child. He remembered the cover, a red narrowboat, but not the title. Our catalogue could not help: searching "red boat" returned paint manuals and a cookery book. We found it eventually by browsing the children's transport shelf together, and I spent the rest of my shift wondering how much of what people know about a book is never recorded anywhere a search can reach. That gap between how collections are described and how people actually remember and look for things is what I want to study at postgraduate level.

My degree in History and Computer Science gave me two ways of approaching the problem. History taught me to read sources critically, asking who created a record, for whom, and what they left out. Computer Science gave me modules in databases and information retrieval, where I first met ideas such as precision and recall and learned why a search that finds everything relevant can still be useless if it also returns hundreds of irrelevant results.

My dissertation brought the two together. A local history society lent me scans of their minute books from 1948 to 1962, handwritten and unindexed. I transcribed around four hundred pages, designed a simple relational database, and built a keyword search with a small controlled vocabulary for recurring subjects such as the village hall, flooding and the bus service. The hardest decisions were not technical. Members used three different names for the same field, and I had to decide whether to standardise them, which made searching easier, or keep the original wording, which preserved the record. I settled on keeping the original text and adding standardised subject terms alongside it, and I documented each choice so future volunteers could change them. The society now uses the index to answer enquiries, which they previously handled by reading through the books by hand.

Since graduating I have worked as a library assistant, mostly on the help desk. Much of the job is ordinary: renewing loans, unjamming the printer, showing people how to reserve items online. But it has made me pay attention to how people phrase questions. Many search for a topic in everyday words that do not match the subject headings, and older users often give up after one failed attempt. I have started keeping an informal note of searches that defeat our catalogue, and I shared a short list with our team leader, who passed several examples on to the cataloguing staff.

Outside work I am helping my grandmother sort roughly two thousand family photographs. She can name people in pictures that no one else can, so we record her memories on the back of copies and in a spreadsheet I set up, with dates marked as estimated where we are unsure. It is slow, and sometimes more about conversation than cataloguing, but it has shown me how quickly context disappears once the person holding it is gone. I also sing in a community choir, where I took on the dull but useful job of organising our sheet music library so members can find parts before rehearsal.

I want to develop a more rigorous understanding of metadata, search behaviour and the computational methods used to analyse text and collections. In particular, I am interested in how retrieval systems can account for the imprecise, descriptive ways people remember things, and how cultural heritage records can be made searchable without stripping away their original language. I would bring practical experience of messy records, solid programming foundations and a habit of listening carefully to the people who use information systems, and I am ready for the more demanding theoretical and technical work that postgraduate study requires.