Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

If SSS or, more importantly, the poorly designed website and Dean Giannini’s responses were included in possible topics?  Instead, this hit SSS’s inbox today:

“Keyword is the newsletter of the Pratt SILS Student Association, also known as SILSSA, also known as YOU!

We are in need of articles, reviews, editorials, and short informative blurbs from any and all who are willing and able. Did you visit a particularly interesting library this summer? Go to ALA’s Annual Conference in Anaheim? Buy a fun new gadget you’d like to review? Maybe you’d like to comment on the librarian who was recently fired for writing a fictionalized account of her workplace, or review the newest search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”). Considering attending the Code4LibNYC meeting at Metro or the NYPL Performing Arts Library Reception for graduate students next week? Why not write up a short account for your fellow students?

Writing an article for Keyword is a great excuse to contact your contemporary library heroes and heroines and pester them with questions to your heart’s content–just take good notes and write it up for us! (SILSSA may even be able to help arrange for your favorite librarian, author, designer or programmer to come speak at SILS, in conjunction with an article, of course–just ask us!)

Writing for Keyword not only looks great on your resume, it also helps students share information with each other and keep abreast of developments in library and information sciences. (Not to mention getting practice at professional writing in a relatively safe environment.) If you’re interested in getting involved (and yes, we also need copyeditors), send an email to us at keyword.silssa@gmail.com. The deadline for the first issue is September 15, but don’t let that stop you! We publish every month, so if we get it a bit late for the first issue, you’ll be first in line for the second.

Yours,

Jessica SpeerEditor, Keyword
Vice President, SILSSA
keyword.silssa@gmail.com

Keyword is the newsletter for SILSSA, the Pratt School of Information and
Library Science Student Association and student chapter of the ALA.

Please visit our latest issue at http://pratt.edu/~silssa/keyword/keywod_may08_final.pdf

If you would like to contribute an article email keyword.silssa@gmail.com”

Funny how outraged SILS students are when a librarian is fired for writing a novel based on her library patrons, but there is nary a mention of the Dean’s threat of retribution if she found out which students were behind this blog.

Interesting that SILS was the subject of an entire blog post on LibraryJournal.com, but there is absolutely no call to comment on that noteworthy mention.  (Note:  the Dean’s promises in this post regarding the website)

Wouldn’t it be nice for an official, real, genuine acknowledgement that something is broken and the Dean refuses to fix it, refuses to work with students?  What is broken is the website and the Dean’s relationship with SILS students and it effects YOU.  Pitch that to Keyword.

The Thing That Made My Eyeballs Bleed Today

Go to the Pratt SILS site. Click on Mission. Prepare yourself for typos, rampant run-on sentences, a broken link and a cacophonous layout.

Seriously, take away all of the design issues for a minute. Please, for the love of God, proofread! It would be unacceptable to hand-in a paper that looked like this. Why is it acceptable for the public face of Pratt SILS to be riddled with typos and incomprehensible sentences?

Summertime

As the semester winds down and thoughts turn to more pleasant things, just a reminder to keep checking back with this blog. We’ll be continuing to post throughout the summer.

We look forward to criticizing many more site features, such as the link on the home page that opens a PDF without warning. Good one!

Where is Pratt?

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from developing this blog, it’s that the site appears to be under the total control of the dean. We have a completely embarrassing site which does nothing to sell the school to prospective students or help current ones, and yet faculty and students stay silent.

Now that the dean has floated the idea of creating a PhD program at SILS, it makes the site even more of an embarrassment. What sort of PhD candidates would we get with such a terrible site? How is the school going to become any sort of legitimate research institution without even the most basic web information standards not being followed? The current site does not lend SILS to be taken seriously.

The Thing That Made My Eyeballs Bleed Today

The latest addition to the html atrocity known as the Pratt SILS site:

OUR CAMPUS - Harnessing digital technology, we teach students to design a more usable and understandable world connecting people, information, ideas and meaning. The Master of Science in Library & Information Science prepares students as professionals in this exciting and challenging field.

Wah? I need an “embarassed” emoticon to fully illustrate how much I cringed when I saw this. Will anyone who looks at the site find this little blurb remotely credulous? I’d love to see a little digital technology harnessed to create a more usable and understandable website for Pratt SILS.

As a side note, it is interesting to SSS how people seem to feel personally about Dean Giannini. While that is not the purpose of SSS, we do believe the Pratt Institute Board of Directors and President Schutte may well want to take note of the students’ level of frustration and the Dean’s complete lack of interest, real or perceived, in listening and acting on student feedback. Great academic leaders put student and institutional needs before their own aspirations.

A Contest

The first person to correctly identify the typo on the front page of the Pratt SILS site wins dinner and a movie with the security guard of their choice.

Pratt SILS is so depressing

How can Pratt SILS market classes like “Usability” and “Information Architecture” while simultaneously having a disastrous website and an on-line registration system that doesn’t work semester after semester? What a bait and switch. Too bad the administration, especially the Dean, are so good at talking and so bad at understanding and doing. Especially doing. No one is interested in the Dean’s long winded explanations of why she can’t do or change something. I’d like to actually see some comprehension in her eyes before she begins yet another soliloquy.

Readers – where will Pratt SILS be in the school ranking in five years under the deanship of Tula? I look forward to your predictions.

The Thing That Made My Eyeballs Bleed Today

The preponderance of photos of Tula. Is it more important to have a well-designed, strongly branded website for Pratt SILS or a place for Tula to post overly large photos of herself? Who is the face of Pratt SILS? Students? Faculty?

or

The Thing That Made My Eyeballs Bleed Today – Reader Contribution

Thank you to one of our dear readers who noted the “ridiculously out of context” pictures of students and their tattoos. I know they are Pratt SILS students and even why photos of their tattoos were taken at School. Unfortunately for us all, no one else does. No explanation is given, the students aren’t even named and, quite frankly, this isn’t the place for the pictures inclusion. The whole page looks bizarre and sloppy. I guess this is the Dean getting edgy and Web 2.0?

Good thing she’s not interested in any feedback from the actual students! Too bad no one has offered to completely overhaul the site! Oh wait. Yes, they have. Well, Tula probably knows best. Just look at the Student page for proof.

The Thing That Made My Eyes Bleed Today

Go the Pratt SILS main page and click on “Library Media Specialist’.

How do you get back to the main page? Got me!