Fall 2019
Working on User Guides for the Denton Public Library - December 10, 2019
For my career development project in INFO 5000, I decided to take advantage of my volunteer position at the Denton Public Library to fulfill the requirements of the project and expose myself to a new challenge. When I approached the Librarians there about my project, they offered me the opportunity to create user guides for some of the new equipment they had purchased for the genealogy center at Emily Fowler Central Library.
For some background, their genealogy center has a technology space called the Legacy Lab that offers library patrons access to equipment that they can use to digitally convert/preserve their various personal records or media. I did some work on creating manuals during my undergraduate degree because I was doing a technical communications minor and some of the classes required creating manuals. However, I never got the chance to create a manual completely independent from class or professor supervision. So this opportunity allowed me to test my skills and get a feel for how it would be to create a manual for a real-world application.
I found it somewhat challenging as at first it felt like I had no real direction, I did talk to the librarians I was working with about what they would expect from these manuals, but how I approached fulfilling these requirements was left for me to decide. They showed me some examples of other manuals that had been created for their equipment and explained that the manual would hopefully be something the user could take and use and not have to ask too many questions about. I think by the end of the project I was much more comfortable with what I was doing, and I believe I created manuals that will be very helpful to the library's patrons.
Information Hunts and Evaluations - A New Experience - December 11, 2019
One of the most interesting things I think I did in my classes for the Fall 2019 semester was the information hunts and evaluations for INFO 5600. Obviously, everyone has had experience trying to find information, resources, or other data when they were at school or for other reasons, but I had never been in a situation where finding the information was so difficult. My undergraduate degree was in history, so I was used to finding research for my class papers, but most of the time I was only using maybe two or three information resources for this purpose. For the info hunts assignment, I was exposed to many new information resources that I had never used before, and at the same time I was asked to evaluate these resources.
I used the CIA World Factbook a number of times for these assignments.
This assignment was interesting not just because it was challenging at times, but also because I found it sort of fun. There were reference questions that would require me to look through multiple resources just to find a very small piece of data. I would sometimes spend a couple hours looking for answers, but I never really got tired of doing it. By the end of the semester, I felt I had gotten a real handle on doing these information hunts and I was somewhat sad that they were over. I learned a lot from those assignments, not only how to find information more efficiently, but also that there were all these resources that I was not taking advantage of and that I sort of wished I had known about when I was doing my undergraduate degree.
Learning about Ethical and Moral Responsibilities in Librarianship - December 12, 2019
During INFO 5000, and a little bit of 5600, we looked at a lot of information about ethical and moral responsibilities in Librarianship. I distinctly remember a good number of the readings that dealt with these issues. The things that stood out to me the most were the issues surrounding underserved populations and bridging the digital divide. I had never really thought about how much a role libraries and librarians can play in helping the poor, uneducated, or marginalized members of our society. As someone who loves technology and how it has connected the world, I found the goal of providing computer and internet access to those who do not have it especially important. Technology and the internet are such important parts of modern society that if you do not have access to them it can make doing a lot of things very hard, especially finding work and other such things. Although my plan is not to work as a public librarian, I can relate to these struggles and I will support those in our profession who are trying to remedy these problems.