ALA Competency 8: Administration & Management
INFO 5200: SWOT Assignment - Completed April 2020
The goal of this assignment was for us to learn how to perform a SWOT analysis by analyzing a fictional library collection.
This was one of the last assignments we had to do for INFO 5200. The goal of the project was to give us experience with performing SWOT evaluations. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. By performing this type of evaluation, we can identify areas where our collections or institutions may need to be improved or changed so that they better support the needs of our patrons. For SWOTs, we were asked to evaluate the situation of a fictional reference library that serves a small winery-focused county in Texas. In many ways this assignment was not that difficult. That being, I did have some trouble identifying opportunities for the library. That part was tough because it was sort of a brainstorming exercise more than anything. Certain ideas that I came up with were kind of obvious after a short review of the situation, while others came from a place of "this could work." I feel this was a very useful assignment and I believe it fits in ALA core competency eight because it taught me about a concept and method that can be used to assess and evaluate library services and collections. It also forced me to think about how libraries can collaborate and network with other organizations to promote library services and collections.
INFO 5400: Eugene McDermott Library Profile - Completed February 7, 2022
This assignment served as the first step in the development of our collection development policy for INFO 5400. For this assignment, we were tasked with creating a profile for a library of our choice. I chose to profile the Eugene McDermott Library at the University of Texas at Dallas.
In INFO 5400, we were tasked with developing a mock collections development policy for a real library of our choosing. The first step of this process was to create a profile of library that we chose. For our profiling, we had to look at the history, target population, provided services, budget, governance, and actual collections development policy of the library and write a summary of the information that we found. While working on this assignment, I learned a lot about my selected library and how they did things. It was also helpful that I was sort working at the library while researching and writing for this assignment. Specifically, I was working in the special collections and archives department at the library. However, I only talk a little about special collections and archives development in the paper because that kind of work was sort of outside of the scope of the project. This assignments fulfills the requirements of ALA core competency eight because it taught me about how certain libraries are governed and how they use their budgets to develop their collections and services to best serve their target populations and surrounding communities.