Master of Library and Information Studies — Library & Information Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Two years ago the school office where I work had a shared drive containing eleven folders called some version of 'Final'. Nobody could find last year's admissions letters without asking the person who had saved them, and that person had left. I spent several quiet afternoons during the holidays agreeing a simple naming pattern with the deputy principal, moving files, and writing a one-page guide that now hangs beside the photocopier. It was not glamorous work, but it was the first time I understood that how information is arranged decides who can use it. That is the question I would like to study properly through a Master of Library and Information Studies.

My first degree was a BA in English and Sociology. Sociology gave me an interest in how institutions keep or lose memory, and English gave me patience with texts. For my Honours project I worked with a congregation in Pinetown that had kept printed newsletters from the 1970s to the early 2000s in cardboard boxes. With permission, I photographed around four hundred issues and built a spreadsheet index of names, events and recurring topics such as school fees, funerals and building funds. My argument was modest: that the newsletters recorded a community's shifting priorities more candidly than its official minutes. The harder part was practical. I had to decide whether to record people's names as printed or standardise them, how to tag events that ran across several issues, and what to leave out when a newsletter mentioned illness or family trouble. I made those choices with my supervisor and the church secretary, but I did not have a framework for them. Reading about cataloguing standards and descriptive metadata afterwards showed me that librarians and archivists have thought carefully about exactly these problems, and I want that grounding.

My job as a school administrator has given me steady, ordinary experience with records. I maintain learner files, process transfer requests, and help parents who need copies of reports, sometimes years later. I have learnt to balance helpfulness with confidentiality, for example confirming identity before releasing documents and explaining calmly why I cannot email a file to an unverified address. I also run the small staff resource room, which mostly means keeping track of who has borrowed which set of textbooks. This has made me interested in the less visible side of libraries: circulation, retention schedules and the question of what an institution is obliged to keep.

Outside work I help on Saturday mornings at a community book swap at our local hall. My role is mainly sorting donations into rough categories and setting aside damaged books, but watching people browse has taught me something. Children's books and isiZulu titles disappear fastest, while shelves of old encyclopaedias barely move. I have started keeping a rough tally to help the organisers decide what to request. I also enjoy birdwatching with a pair of second-hand binoculars, and keeping a field list has made me appreciate a well-designed field guide, where the arrangement of information matters as much as its accuracy.

I am particularly drawn to digital preservation and to questions of access in multilingual settings, because the newsletter project showed me how fragile local paper records are and how much depends on who describes them. I expect the course to challenge my habit of solving problems with a spreadsheet and some common sense; I want to replace improvisation with principles I can explain and defend. I am organised, comfortable working with the public, and used to careful, repetitive tasks that need accuracy. I would bring those habits to postgraduate study, along with a practical sense of how records serve, or fail, the people who need them.