I wondered if I could ask for an insight into studying a Aberystwyth by distance as I am considering doing the BSc Econ in Library and Information studies. My dilemma is that I do not have a degree and the course is a bit of a financial risk for me. Would you be able to send me a sample of your work so that I could gauge the calibre of what is expected of me? How many hours research would you say your course consumes in a week to give me a guide alongside my full time job. Hope you can help, thank you in advance.
Mark – Hi Mark, thanks for visiting. I don’t really know much about the BSc program, but I will see if I can get someone to fill you in on the details.
I am currently finishing the BSc in Information and Library Studies, so I thought I’d answer your question. Feel free to ask me any other questions though!
I found this an ideal way to do a degree because you don’t have to attend lectures. All the workload can be done in your own time and you can space the degree out over 6 years if you need to. I have managed to complete the degree within 3 years, which has meant giving up my social life a bit, but it is possible.
I have self funded the course and because you can pay per module, it spaces the funding out and makes the costs more manageable. The level of writing is also not as advanced as a masters would be and you are given plenty of advice on how to write and how much to write. There is also a good opportunity to write reports and assignments in different structures than just an essay. I have found this invaluable in my job. The other key thing that has happened with this course is that it has led onto a librarian post for me. Which I’m pretty sure I would not have achieved if I hadn’t completed the course.
The other good thing about this course is that you can leave with a diploma if you needed to finish early, so you still end up with a qualification. I would recommend doing the course this way, but it does take up quite a lot of your time.
from what you say, I am more reassured…. if it was that I could get through to library work as you have that would be phenomenal too- congrats, you’ve earned it. I started looking into the course in preparation for a September start and was shocked to learn the entry deadline is April with a July start; I think I’m going to sit this out and do more research before I commit hard earned cash. Thanks to Ian and yourself for getting back to me.
Take care,
Mark
PS – if anyone else wants to comment, I’m still interested
Hi – this is the wrong place for this, but I couldn’t find your contact button in the side bar (I’m hoping it’s not actually there, in a way – that way I won’t be an Information Professional who can’t find a link on a website..). Anyway, you mention in your profile you are particularly interested in the digital divide, so I just wanted to make sure you knew about the BOBCATSSS conference on that very subject – details are here: http://bobcatsss2010.unipr.it/ (and I believe the papers deadline has been extended till September sometime).
Hi wikiman. Thanks for passing that on, I will certainly have a look at it. Incidentally, my contact is related to the Yahoo! button. My username is weaklemondrink so you can email me at Yahoo! using that name. It’s not very clear, but it stops spam. Well, so far anyway! Thanks for dropping by!
Hi – I was struggling to find your sidebar so thought I would drop you a note here instead. I can see you are interested in bookmarking.
We have recently created a bookmarking site called that we hope you may wish to review. We felt that existing bookmarking sites made it too difficult to bookmark quickly and effectively. We also thought that these bookmarks could soon get out of control and were not laid out in a visually nice way. Favilous offers the option to categorise your links and save articles for viewing later (much like Instapaper). You can also see what sites are hot (bookmarked most recently) and what sites are most popular. Apple focus on stylish products and very easy to use products – we feel we are a good match.
You can also see what is being bookmarked in the community and this page is of great value to users as bookmarks are accompanied by site descriptions which help users discover new sites of interest (site descriptions are created when a user bookmarks a site via our bookmarking tools).
We are proud of our simple, clean design. We have noticed people are interested in just simple bookmarking (Pinboard are enjoying great success) and we thought this idea coupled with our user friendly, fresh interface and one that can be customised by the user by letting them change their background (we felt Bing had gained traffic partly down to the stylish background pictures that sit behind the search box) we feel we can take the big social bookmarking players on.
We have been launched for a few days now and have already picked up a good review from VentureBeat. Any questions feel free to get in touch with us.
We are soon launching a Spotify and media part to the site which will make bookmarking Spotfiy songs and playlists extremely easy. We are adding themed pages so that users can discover useful bookmarks easily. We are going to be implementing an archiving system and the ability to be able to bookmark twitter feeds. Fundamentally though we will be improving the bookmarking process by adapting our tools to become even easier to use. We want people to take their browser where-ever they go, with Favilous they can not only look at articles but sites too; in a simple way. In the next few weeks we are going to be launching our business service – think Yammer for social bookmarking.
We hope that you like what we have done. We appreciate it is a competitive market but by focusing on bookmarking and the ease of bookmarking we hope we can gain an edge.
![thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian…](https://thoughtsofawannabelibrarian.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cropped-3626074280_19f3a60f48_b1.jpg)
thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian... 
Hi
I wondered if I could ask for an insight into studying a Aberystwyth by distance as I am considering doing the BSc Econ in Library and Information studies. My dilemma is that I do not have a degree and the course is a bit of a financial risk for me. Would you be able to send me a sample of your work so that I could gauge the calibre of what is expected of me? How many hours research would you say your course consumes in a week to give me a guide alongside my full time job. Hope you can help, thank you in advance.
Mark.
Mark – Hi Mark, thanks for visiting. I don’t really know much about the BSc program, but I will see if I can get someone to fill you in on the details.
Hi Mark,
I am currently finishing the BSc in Information and Library Studies, so I thought I’d answer your question. Feel free to ask me any other questions though!
I found this an ideal way to do a degree because you don’t have to attend lectures. All the workload can be done in your own time and you can space the degree out over 6 years if you need to. I have managed to complete the degree within 3 years, which has meant giving up my social life a bit, but it is possible.
I have self funded the course and because you can pay per module, it spaces the funding out and makes the costs more manageable. The level of writing is also not as advanced as a masters would be and you are given plenty of advice on how to write and how much to write. There is also a good opportunity to write reports and assignments in different structures than just an essay. I have found this invaluable in my job. The other key thing that has happened with this course is that it has led onto a librarian post for me. Which I’m pretty sure I would not have achieved if I hadn’t completed the course.
The other good thing about this course is that you can leave with a diploma if you needed to finish early, so you still end up with a qualification. I would recommend doing the course this way, but it does take up quite a lot of your time.
Anyway I hope that helps,
Sophie :o)
Hi Sophie,
from what you say, I am more reassured…. if it was that I could get through to library work as you have that would be phenomenal too- congrats, you’ve earned it. I started looking into the course in preparation for a September start and was shocked to learn the entry deadline is April with a July start; I think I’m going to sit this out and do more research before I commit hard earned cash. Thanks to Ian and yourself for getting back to me.
Take care,
Mark
PS – if anyone else wants to comment, I’m still interested
Hi – this is the wrong place for this, but I couldn’t find your contact button in the side bar (I’m hoping it’s not actually there, in a way – that way I won’t be an Information Professional who can’t find a link on a website..). Anyway, you mention in your profile you are particularly interested in the digital divide, so I just wanted to make sure you knew about the BOBCATSSS conference on that very subject – details are here: http://bobcatsss2010.unipr.it/ (and I believe the papers deadline has been extended till September sometime).
Cheers
thewikiman
Hi wikiman. Thanks for passing that on, I will certainly have a look at it. Incidentally, my contact is related to the Yahoo! button. My username is weaklemondrink so you can email me at Yahoo! using that name. It’s not very clear, but it stops spam. Well, so far anyway! Thanks for dropping by!
Hi – I was struggling to find your sidebar so thought I would drop you a note here instead. I can see you are interested in bookmarking.
We have recently created a bookmarking site called that we hope you may wish to review. We felt that existing bookmarking sites made it too difficult to bookmark quickly and effectively. We also thought that these bookmarks could soon get out of control and were not laid out in a visually nice way. Favilous offers the option to categorise your links and save articles for viewing later (much like Instapaper). You can also see what sites are hot (bookmarked most recently) and what sites are most popular. Apple focus on stylish products and very easy to use products – we feel we are a good match.
You can also see what is being bookmarked in the community and this page is of great value to users as bookmarks are accompanied by site descriptions which help users discover new sites of interest (site descriptions are created when a user bookmarks a site via our bookmarking tools).
We are proud of our simple, clean design. We have noticed people are interested in just simple bookmarking (Pinboard are enjoying great success) and we thought this idea coupled with our user friendly, fresh interface and one that can be customised by the user by letting them change their background (we felt Bing had gained traffic partly down to the stylish background pictures that sit behind the search box) we feel we can take the big social bookmarking players on.
We have been launched for a few days now and have already picked up a good review from VentureBeat. Any questions feel free to get in touch with us.
We are soon launching a Spotify and media part to the site which will make bookmarking Spotfiy songs and playlists extremely easy. We are adding themed pages so that users can discover useful bookmarks easily. We are going to be implementing an archiving system and the ability to be able to bookmark twitter feeds. Fundamentally though we will be improving the bookmarking process by adapting our tools to become even easier to use. We want people to take their browser where-ever they go, with Favilous they can not only look at articles but sites too; in a simple way. In the next few weeks we are going to be launching our business service – think Yammer for social bookmarking.
We hope that you like what we have done. We appreciate it is a competitive market but by focusing on bookmarking and the ease of bookmarking we hope we can gain an edge.
Many thanks
Steve
http://www.favilous.com