Information science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My dissertation was meant to be about a strike at a local rope works in 1911. In practice, I spent as much time working out why I could find so little about it. The county archive's online catalogue described the relevant holdings as "miscellaneous papers, c.1905-1920" in a single line, while the digitised newspaper archive returned nothing useful until I searched for the owner's surname rather than the works. The material existed; the description did not lead me to it. When I eventually worked through the box in the searchroom, I found minute books that answered most of my questions. That gap between what a collection contains and what its description reveals is why I want to study information science formally.

My History degree gave me useful habits: reading finding aids closely, keeping a careful record of where things came from, and being sceptical about why some voices are easier to retrieve than others. It also gave me practice in working systematically through large amounts of unstructured material. What it did not give me was any grounding in how information systems are designed, how retrieval actually works, or how organisations decide what to keep. I have been filling in edges of that on my own, but I am conscious that I am working from guesswork and I would like proper theory and vocabulary behind what I do.

The most useful thing I have done since graduating is a small project with the community choir I sing with. Its sheet music lived in four plastic crates, and rehearsals often began with ten minutes of searching. I offered to sort it out. I started with a spreadsheet, then realised I was making decisions I had no basis for: whether to record the arranger, how to handle photocopies of unclear provenance, what to do with sets missing tenor parts. I read about Dublin Core and looked at how published music is described in library catalogues, then settled on a deliberately simple record: title, composer, arranger, voicing, number of copies, condition, and a note field. About 320 items are now listed, stored in an open-source collection management tool running on a spare laptop, with the crates relabelled to match. Two practical lessons stood out. First, consistency matters more than richness; my early records used three different forms of the same composer's name and were effectively unsearchable. Second, the people using a catalogue do not search the way the cataloguer expects, so our committee members search by the concert a piece was last sung at, which is now a field.

My job in council customer services has been unexpectedly relevant. I handle enquiries where residents describe a problem in their own words and I have to translate it into the categories our case system will accept. Poorly chosen categories send cases to the wrong team and add weeks of delay. It has made me think about classification as something with consequences for people, not just a filing convenience, and it has taught me to write clearly for readers who are tired and in a hurry.

I am particularly keen to study information retrieval, metadata standards and the organisation of digital collections, and to understand the ethical questions around data, access and long-term preservation. I have read some of David Weinberger's writing on how digital arrangement differs from physical arrangement, which was a helpful corrective to my instinct that everything should have one correct place. In the longer term I would like to work in a public or academic library service, or in a records role within local government, where description and access are the daily work rather than an afterthought. I am ready to move from improvising to being properly trained.