Is it too early to think about my E-Portfolio?

One of my students asked if I could talk about the e-portfolio. It is one of the two options students can choose as their culminating work to satisfy our MLIS requirements. I'm actually impressed that she's starting to think about it now, and I think it's a great question. So even though I did already respond in private email, I want to share what I discussed here as well for other students. So the answer to the title of this post is a definite no! Starting to plan now means you will be prepared when your time to work on your e-portfolio comes around.

First off, the e-portfolio must satisfy all the Core Competencies for the program; there are currently 15, A-O. One thing students can do to plan for meeting all the competencies is to check out which offered classes meet each of the competencies. You can do that here. Each student's academic advisor can also help plan out classes to take if a student isn't sure which electives to enroll for. Just a side note that students may be able to use additional experience outside their MLIS course to help satisfy the Core Competencies.

SLIS also provides an extensive e-portfolio handbook that has detailed information about the e-portfolio requirements and how to meet them. I encourage anyone thinking about the e-portfolio (no matter where in the program you are) to check it out since this will give you a really good idea of what to expect. Each student will be assigned an e-portfolio advisor when they enroll in LIBR 289 in MySJSU in their last semester; this person will not necessarily be the same as their academic advisor and in fact will likely be someone different. This person will guide students through the e-portfolio process, review their work, and give advice on what to improve as they work through supporting each competency with their work.

Students can complete their e-portfolio through the D2L e-portfolio platform or through another platform that they and their e-portfolio advisor agree on. I have heard of e-portfolios completed on a student-made website, for example. Students can enroll in the D2L e-portfolio site by following the instructions in this guide; they don't need to be taking LIBR 289 to do so. This gives students a way to check out the e-portfolio interface provided by SLIS, and they can start uploading their work as they go.

So now that all this information has been thrown at you, what should you do now? My recommendations--aside from reviewing any e-portfolio information you can--would be to make sure and collect your work as you progress through your program and assign it to a competency. I've kept final drafts for all of my work over the course of my program, and I have copies on my laptop, my thumb drive, and in my D2L e-portfolio platform (that's another thing--back up your work!!!!). I also created a folder for LIBR 289 and created subfolders for each competency (A-O). I've put copies of my final drafts into the competency's folder that I feel each one satisfies. To help figure this out, each class (and sometimes each assignment) lists the competency that it satisfies on its greensheet. I've also gone so far as to create a document that lists each competency and notes each of the classes I've taken that fulfill it underneath. This gives me a great visual to see which competencies I have securely under my belt. Doing so actually helped me to plan which two classes I would take this semester (I was in need of some competency K work).

The e-portfolio is a big project, and one that ideally you want to plan for during your whole program. Organizing as you go will mean that your work is easily accessible and less chaotic when it comes time to put it all together!

The Month In Review, Part 2

I don't talk about my work much on this blog. For one thing, I have to be cognizant of keeping various "company secrets" confidential, and sometimes it's hard for me to determine how confidential something must remain. So I keep mum about everything just to be sure. But I would like to break the code of silence to discuss a project that I've been working on that's been six months in the making. Nothing mentioned here would compromise confidentiality, and this has been a major part of my workload (and subsequently stress) this month.

The trade school that I work as librarian at is one of several sharing the same name that are located across the nation. The project I've been involved in is to create an online resource for students and faculty that will be available at all the campuses. There are only two of us working on it: myself, and another librarian that oversees resources for all the campuses. The interface that we're using is LibGuides, a system that many libraries use in order to create guides for their patrons. It is used by public, academic, and other types of libraries. I was actually called on to help create a complex LibGuide resource for an online university prior to this project, and I used LibGuides to create a pathfinder for one of my MLIS classes--so I am very familiar with creating and editing pages and content. For the resource in this current project, we will be providing some general resources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, research/writing guides, etc.), student success resources, career resources, and resources that are directly related to and discuss concepts that are part of the various academic programs that the schools provide. For the most part, all of the resources we chose to include had to be freely accessible with no login or passwords required. The only exceptions to this were the online databases that the schools subscribe to; landing pages and overviews for the databases were created to provide students with easy access.

I've looked at many other LibGuides, and they run the gamut from sparsely populated and out-of-date to complex and well-maintained. For the most part, I see very little dynamic content on LibGuides; to me, it seems that the general attitude is one of "create it and forget it." This seems like it would be short-sighted; having dynamic content that changes would encourage users to keep coming back to see what's new. With the LibGuide that we've created, we made it a priority to include things like RSS feeds, embedded YouTube channels, and Twitter and Facebook feeds (where appropriate). By doing so, we hope to spark student and faculty interest in the content and see users returning multiple times.

Once again, the needs of the user became one of the forefront concerns when determining what content to include and how to organize it. In the LibGuide that I helped to create for the online university, we included a number of resources for college-level General Education subjects because those courses were offered by the university. For this current LibGuide project, we're not including anything like that because the campuses do not offer those types of courses (however we are including high-school level General Education resources since several campuses offer GED prep help). We also didn't include as much on research and writing as we did in the online university LibGuide because the trade school students don't do an excessive amount of either for their programs. I gathered input from students at the campus where I work so that we could also include resources that would interest them. The LibGuide is being created to be used, and we want to utilize all possible outlets to make that happen.

This month has been spent adding a lot of content and finalizing the overall organization of the LibGuide. Finally, we will see the fruits of our labor and the LibGuide will be going live within the next few weeks. If I can share the actual guide here, I will post a link when it's available.

Creating Guides

My first and current project for my internship is putting together a guide that will teach MCFL staff how to create blog posts on their staff site. The original guide was a "quick and dirty" how-to that went over the basic steps--essentially providing just enough information to allow the staff to create said content. However, now the task is to create a guide that will be much more illustrative and provide information on some of the other things they can add to their blog post (as well as include the basics found in the first guide).

Before I even started the project, I took a look at the available guides--the original guide that my work will replace and another guide created for posting blogs on the library's public site. The former gave me an idea of what skill level I would need to accommodate, and the latter let me see an example of a much more complete guide that included illustrations. It is important when creating anything to know your audience and make sure that you are keeping in mind the lowest denominator (aka the lowest skill level) of those that will be using it. This is actually a concept that came up in my first coding class of my MLIS program. To be truly "user friendly," your content will need to reach the greatest number of users possible. Because I knew that screenshots of the pages would be particularly helpful for those less computer savvy, this was my first step. I took a number of screenshots, from the log-in page for the staff all the way through the process to where they save and publish their blog entry.

My next step was to start outlining the process--using language that was not heavy in technical jargon, of course--and editing the screenshots to serve as useful illustrations. This is the part I'm still in the process of completing. As I've been editing, I've realized that there are additional screenshots of particular buttons/features that I now want to include. I'm hoping that this guide doesn't become TOO big with everything that I would like to put in it. I haven't been given a maximum page length, but I know that the longer the guide the less likely anyone will read the entire thing. It needs to be useful both in content and in length; since this is for library staff, I must assume that my audience does not have a lot of free time to read a lengthy how-to guide.

I actually made a discovery as I was doing this (never stop trying to learn new things!). I'm creating the original guide using Microsoft Word, with the intent to convert it into a .pdf file for the format that will actually be made available to the library's staff; this is done both for longevity and to make sure users can't accidentally delete content of the guide and not know how to bring it back, which I can foresee happening with an editable Word file (yes I know editing can be restricted, but that can create problems if passwords to allow future changes are lost). Anyway, as I was using Word, I discovered the beauty of text boxes (something I've never used in Word before because c'mon, it's Word!). One in particular was of a style very appropriate to that of the guide, so now I'm using it to compartmentalize information that may seem like a "duh!" kind of thing for those with my skill level, but would not be immediately obvious to those with less computer comfort. That way, more experienced users can easily skip over this information and spend less time reading/skimming through text they don't need. It's a way to increase accessibility through visual cues. Neat, huh?

I'm very pleased with how the guide has turned out so far and hope to have it completed by tomorrow (I would prefer to finish it today). I've definitely enjoyed letting my creativity play a major role in the design--perhaps this is a skill set I can continue to work on and use to market myself for future library positions.

CD and Censorship

As I progress through this latest of my classes, my program continues to be a source of new knowledge and enlightenment. The topic of collection management and development is almost overwhelming in its complexity, and there is so much exposure to things that I had never before considered--one of which is how collection development (CD) can consort with censorship, even unintentionally.

Time and time again, I see the same message filtered through my classes and class material: "Libraries should provide the information that its community desires. Librarians should not withhold material from anyone just because the information is controversial or otherwise seen as 'inappropriate.*' " This concept is so important, it makes up the first part of the Library Bill of Rights. That's why, when it comes to CD librarians need to be careful in their selections, both to make sure that the information needs of the community are being met and to ensure that their own biases are not affecting their decisions.

As a previous post alluded, CD is how a library creates its collection of resources. Decisions on what to get, how to get it, how much to pay for it, and even when or how to get rid of other items all falls under some part of CD. Librarians that make some or all of these decisions have a lot of power in that they directly affect what will reach the hands--and computers in the case of electronic resources--of the patrons served by the library. Can you see where I'm going with this? A librarian with a strong bias can be a dangerous thing when mixed with CD, and some self-reflection may be necessary to ensure that the librarian can remain neutral when it comes to deciding on items (physical and digital) to add to a library's collection. Otherwise this bias can act as a form of censorship. Choosing not to include a resource--if the reason is NOT related to the suitability of the item to the library's community--is an insidious form of censorship simply because the library patrons don't even know that it's happening. Their access is being restricted and they aren't even aware of the fact to advocate for themselves. So being self-aware, neutral, and keeping the library's community as the focus (not the item itself) is incredibly important for librarians.

There's a number of other topics that CD touches--including Open Access, digital ownership, and the Digital Divide (not just a buzzword, but a real problem in many urban areas). I hope to explore more of these topics further in future posts.

*Please note that there is a difference between "inappropriate" and "illegal."

Collection Management

One could argue that a library isn't a library without the resources (in whatever form they come) used to provide patrons with the information they desire. Nowadays, more and more of these information resources are digital, and it is common for even smaller libraries to subscribe to at least one online database. But determining the resources a library should choose to provide falls under the ongoing task of collection management.

In public libraries, you'll see a significant portion of the collection dedicated to fiction items--as this is what patrons often want to borrow from their local library--as well as non-fiction items. University library collections (at least from my observation) tip the scale to be heavily in favor of non-fiction in order to support the research community they serve. To my understanding, special libraries seem to be much more specialized and focus on a much more specific range of topics in order to serve whatever group of people rely on their resources. The library in which I work, while it does serve an academic community, is more specialized than the norm in a college or university library because the programs here are so specialized. So in that regard, it would have more in common with a special library.

And now I have to consider some long-term development for the collection. This campus has not had a change in the programs offered here for some time. However, within the next year, there will be some programs added to those we currently offer, which means that the collection will have to reflect these additional programs as well. It's a challenge especially since space is at a prime and I will need to do some serious weeding in order to make room. Not only that, but I will need to consult with the faculty on both items to weed and items to add since I'm no expert in the programs here (which are all mechanics and trade-based). I have learned quite a bit since I started working here, but I know that the instructors know their trades far better than me, and I bow to their many years of experience in their chosen field.

So it is rather well-timed that I have registered for a Collection Management class for this upcoming semester of my program. I have many questions: How do you successfully elicit input on materials from faculty? Should students also be consulted for recommendations and how would you collect such recommendations? How do you determine what percentage of the collection should be given to each subject area? How often should you update your materials? How often should you weed out older materials? How old is too old? How do you budget for your collection and anticipated materials requisitions? It will be incredibly useful to find out how to successfully manage a collection right when I need to utilize those skills in a real-life work experience.

I know that I have some posts to catch up on--and some recipes too! I will do my best to post a new recipe this week.

Britannica is going paperless

A recent article explains Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc's change to go completely digital. The printed set has been around for almost 250 years--a venerable collection of the knowledge of the ages, and I'm sure a very interesting record of how information changed over the course of its printed history (perhaps an enlightening study could be made of this?). Just seeing what someone 200 years ago thought was important to know would be fascinating. The social changes that have come about during its existence--and all being documented to some effect simply by what is included and how it's discussed--are staggering in number.

But enough reminiscing. The company's decision is certainly keeping up with the times. It joins many other well-known and well-respected subscription services that are available only online (many research databases come to mind). And I can understand why Britannica made the decision: the print version is not in high demand and could be seen as an "outdated" mode of information. The article mentioned above states that the vast majority of the company's sales are through its digital version. Good business dictates that the company "give the people what they want," which their sales show is, by and large, the online encyclopedia. And I do have to say that I like the online version and see it as a valuable resource that libraries should try to provide.

And yet such a decision bothers me somewhat. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a great source of information, and with the death of the print version the "have-nots" in our society will be left without an alternative. Many people accept that online sources are the new reality and assume that everyone is "plugged in," when in actuality we are not in a time when the Internet is accessible to all. So how do we serve them? Libraries do their part to provide Internet services as much as they can to as many patrons as they can, but there are many the Internet still does not reach. Patrons from low-income families and libraries serving low-income populations may lose out here. Libraries that can't afford an annual subscription (but could afford to purchase the set every 3-4 years) will soon be left with outdated material they will need to find a substitution for--which may not be as well-written or as comprehensive.

In addition, I would like to humbly point out the inherent problem of relying too much on digital sources. A printed source has a permanence in its physicality that digital sources will never have; they can be too easily changed--or lost. (Think about this for a moment--who owns a digital copy of The Hunger Games on a Kindle or Nook? The person who purchased it? The company that provided it? The publisher? The author? Consider that Amazon can remove any book you purchase for a Kindle with no more compensation that a refund, regardless if you wanted to keep that book. This has happened to Kindle owners on a number of occasions and has helped to create a debate about digital ownership and access to controversial materials.) Aside from digital ownership issues, there another issue to consider. Computers are not perfect, and access can be affected by faulty devices trying to access the resource or the server used by the resource going down or experiencing functionality issues. What happens when everything is digital and the servers go down? Does that mean we won't be able to access anything?

As much as I like the possibilities that digital and online services provide (and I use them on a daily basis), I hope that print resources stick around for many more years.