Intellectual
Although my résumé includes two academic papers that I wrote for independent projects during my undergraduate studies, they are mostly testaments to a large amount of work and are not necessarily written at a professional level. I attended a college that placed a large emphasis on writing skills, but as a Russian/Mathematics major, I had very few assignments that actually required me to use those skills (although writing a 20 page paper in Russian was a difficult feat). The iSchool, however, has provided me with ample opportunity to work towards creating professional-level documents. Although I would not consider every project I have completed in the MLIS program to be up to professional standards, I have constantly striven towards that goal. As a result, I have created a few documents I think fall into this upper category.
LIS 528 presentation
In the 2006 winter quarter, I took LIS 528: Health Sciences Information Needs, Resources, and Environment. The final requirement for this class was a research paper/presentation project describing a particular group in the health care world and a new possible information service for that group. This was my first in-depth project involving the exploration of a specific user group, and I encountered several challenges. I chose to focus on rural physicians, and developed a service whose main component involved establishing connections between rural physicians and their public librarians. I undertook as exhaustive a literature review as I knew how to do at the time (I had not yet taken any other reference courses), and created a new service based on what had and had not worked in the information I found. I had informal discussions on the topic with my father, who at one time had himself been a rural physician, about some of the difficulties of the profession. Synthesizing my findings and my service into a paper was the next challenging step; as mentioned above, I have had little experience writing true research papers. Creating and giving the presentation provided the last big challenge of this project. I used HTML slides in an effort to make the presentation more easily accessible, and discovered not only picking out the content from my paper to be difficult, but also giving the slides the professional quality I wanted them to have. Although in retrospect, there is much that could be done to improve the final project, it is still a significant achievement and was my first recognizable step towards improving my professional-level arguments.
LIS 523 Service Proposal
I took the Advanced Information Services course (LIS 528) in the autumn of 2006 and, along with my fellow students, worked most of the quarter on a single paper describing a service proposal for a particular setting. At first, I felt that the small setting I picked would be easier and more straightforward than attempting to create a new service for an already well-researched one. I picked the Richard Hugo House Member Library, where I had been volunteering for about 4 months. Quickly, I discovered that it was not as straightforward as I originally believed. There was very little research on settings even vaguely similar to mine, and I had almost no knowledge of my users because I almost never saw even one. As we learned in class, identifying a problem or issue is the first step to developing a strong service proposal, but because I had very little information, even this was extremely difficult. I eventually decided to start with this lack of an issue as the potential problem that I needed to solve. Once in this frame of mind, I realized that the major cause of the lack of information on RHH Library users was a lack of users entirely. Neither my manager at RHH nor I had any strong opinions as to why there were so few users, but I had found a problem that I could work with. Over the course of the quarter, I submitted various drafts of my proposal and with the help of our lecturer, Ph.D. candidate Phil Edwards, and eventually developed a service. The goal was to make more members aware of the library and increase the actual value of the membership (the library is only open to members) by demonstrating the resources the library can provide. Although the proposal has yet to be implemented, I did e-mail the final version to my manager and we eventually hope to be able to use it, if not in its entirety (although the plan I developed has almost no cost, it involves a lot more time than the current volunteers and the library manager can handle), than at least in adapted parts. This was my first experience developing an actual professional plan, and because it is in a setting where I may actually be able to see it happen, it is doubly meaningful.
Woodland Park Zoo CD policy
I consider the creation of the collection development (CD) policy for the Woodland Park Zoo library, the culmination of my collection development class (LIS 522), to be my most professional-level document to date. It is the result of group work, which was certainly challenging in that it is quite difficult to divide up a paper equally and make it sound coherent. I am interested in group research in the future, though, so this was a wonderful opportunity to practice evenly distributing the research work as well as collaborating together to actually write the final document. However, the main challenge in this case was that we chose to create a policy not only for a real setting, but to involve the setting’s library manager (it is a one person library, and the manager is not a librarian but is in the education department). We wanted to have a product in the end that would actually be useful to someone and hopefully improve the Zoo Library’s current situation. We were very fortunate in that the manager was more than willing to work with us, and that we were actually able to schedule a meeting with her and see the library as well as communicate by e-mail. We were not as fortunate in that it was very difficult to find CD policies for other zoos, a requirement for the project. Eventually, we managed to find one each, after many phone calls and e-mails and dead-ends. We did end up having to write ours from scratch as these policies were, for the most part, not much more than a simple statement. The whole process was very rewarding, however, and I found out a lot about the work involved in creating library policy.
Conclusion
The ability to create professional-level documents and presentations is of vital importance in the LIS world, where policies can make or break a particular setting, new services have to be researched and argued before implementation, and documents about specific user groups serve as continuing education material for other information professionals. My own experiences in this area before my time at the iSchool provided me only with a certain level of writing ability. Over the past months, I have noticed marked improvement in my writing, and I have developed some sense of what a LIS professional document or presentation looks like and how to create them myself. As with my teaching experience, I know I have a long way to go, but I also know I have come a long way. I have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, the challenges associated with this aspect of the LIS field.
