Library and information science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate dissertation began with four cardboard boxes in the back room of a community hall. A local amateur dramatic society, founded in 1948, had agreed to let me use its records, and I arrived expecting minute books and found instead programmes, till receipts, costume inventories, three unlabelled reels of tape and a great deal of loose correspondence. Before I could argue anything about how amateur theatre sustained itself in a small town, I had to decide what I actually had. I spent several weeks sorting the material by series rather than by date, drafting a simple listing in a spreadsheet, and writing scope notes so that the committee could find things after I had gone. That listing turned out to be the part of the work I was proudest of, and it is the reason I am applying for a master's in library and information science rather than continuing in history.

My degree gave me the habits that this field depends on: patience with incomplete evidence, care about provenance, and a willingness to explain where information came from. It also showed me the limits of doing organisational work by instinct. My original spreadsheet used headings I had invented myself, so when a committee member asked whether the tapes were described anywhere, I could not answer quickly. Reading afterwards about archival arrangement and description, and about the difference between item-level and collection-level approaches, clarified what I had been improvising. I have since worked through introductory writing on classification and cataloguing, and I have been particularly interested in how controlled vocabularies make searching possible for people who do not share the cataloguer's assumptions about wording. Ranganathan's idea that a library is a growing organism has stayed with me, mostly because it frames organisation as something that has to be maintainable rather than merely correct on the day it is finished.

Since graduating I have worked on the service desk of a garden centre, handling returns, plant queries, orders and the occasional complaint. It is not library work, but it has taught me a good deal about how people ask questions. Customers rarely state what they need; they describe a symptom, or a corner of a garden, and the useful answer comes from a few careful questions rather than from the first thing they said. That is recognisably similar to the reference interview, and it has made me less anxious about the public-facing side of the profession. I have also become the colleague people ask when the stock system will not find an item, largely because I take the time to try alternative spellings and product names.

Alongside this I am secretary of a community film club of around sixty members. I maintain the membership list, the record of what we have screened and the licensing paperwork, and last year I reorganised eight years of accumulated files into a shared structure with consistent naming so that any committee member can find a past licence or programme note. Attendance at our documentary strand improved after I compiled a simple index of previous screenings, which stopped us repeating titles and let us plan around gaps. It is a modest piece of work, but it convinced me that information management is useful in ordinary settings and not only in large institutions.

I hope to develop rigorous skills in cataloguing, metadata and digital preservation, and to understand information literacy teaching and the ethics of access. In the longer term I would like to work in a public library service or a local studies collection, where the records of societies like the one I catalogued tend to end up, and where the standard of description decides whether anyone finds them.

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