ALA Competency 4: Technological Knowledge & Skills
INFO 5000: Career Development Project - Completed December 2019
For the career development project, we were tasked with participating in a leadership/ career development activity. This could have been many different things, but I decided on working with an information professional on a project. I ended up helping create user guides for some digitization equipment at Denton Public Library.
For this assignment, I created three user guides for digitization equipment at the Emily Fowler Public Library in Denton. This equipment was recently acquired by the library for their legacy lab, which is a technology center that library patrons can use to digitize and preserve their own personal records and media. To complete this assignment properly, I had to become deeply familiar with the equipment I was creating user guides for as I was trying to create material that would teach people how to use this equipment very quickly. Another thing that I learned a little bit about through this assignment was how the library decides when to get new equipment for the legacy lab and what they get. I also learned more about how libraries can be technology centers, where patrons can access technology that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or unobtainable. I believe this assignment applies to ALA core competency four because I learned about how libraries use and deploy technology to serve their communities, how to use some digitization technologies, and how to teach others to use these technologies.
INFO 5815: Final Project - Completed April 2021
This project consisted of me taking photographs of various objects in my house and then record metadata for each items using a metadata schema of my choosing. Lastly, I had to upload the resulting image files to an image sharing site. The goal of this assignment was to give us hands-on experience with digital imaging techniques and concepts.
This was a really fun assignment. I love technology and being able to get some experience with taking "professional" looking photos was a really great learning experience. I learned a lot about proper lighting techniques and adjusting focus and aperture settings. Getting properly lit and in focus images was actually quite challenging, so I am really proud of the image quality that I was able to achieve in the end. Collecting the metadata for each object was fun because I actually had to do some pretty intense research for a few of the objects to figure out the proper information for them. I also did some basic manipulation to some of the images to get them looking right, like rotating and cropping them. The image sharing site I end up using was Flickr (the album is still up and available as of writing this) and it was quite easy to use and upload my photos. I believe this assignment is a good fit for this core competency because it taught me about the challenges and methods of using imaging technology for library or archival purposes, as well as how to collect and store metadata for digital assets.