Highlights of my GSLIS Work
On this page, I would like to share a selection of a few of the projects that I have created during my time as a student in this program. They represent some of the core and elective courses that I completed. Choosing what to present was very challenging as I have had so many wonderful experiences in my past two years as a student. It was also challenging because I am a very private person and opening myself up to criticism is scary! I hope you enjoy taking a look at this small sample of the wide variety of projects that I have done.
LibGuide Examples
An early project that I completed in my GSLIS program was the following LibGuide for the introductory Reference and Information Services course. The organization of the information was limited by the parameters set by the assignment, but I had free rein on topic choice. Therefore, I selected a topic that I felt could be useful for the target audience, which was inspired by my time as a Command Family Ombudsman. Please click the screenshot to open the LibGuide in a new tab.
Reference and Instruction LibGuide
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Another LibGuide that I created was for the Digital Information Literacy Instruction course. This LibGuide contains the lesson plans that I created throughout this course. The skills and confidence that I learned in this course, particularly in the field experience, will be foundational to my career in reference services. The principles of backward design will be crucial to my success in developing instructional programs throughout my reference career. Please click the screenshot to open the LibGuide in a new tab.
Information Literacy Instruction LibGuide
[image by author]
Young Adult Materials and Services Blog
I enjoy working with teens, so I can also see myself as a YA Librarian. I chose YA Materials and Services as an elective, in part for personal reasons (for helping my teenager and her friends), but also because I hope to work with this age group at some point. This was one of the most enjoyable, though challenging, courses of my career as a library student. I grew and developed a great deal through the projects in this course. Please click the screenshot to visit my blog where I display all of my work from this course. Again, I apologize if there are any broken links on the blog.
Young Adult Blog
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Digital Visual Literacy Presentation
This is one of the presentations that I created in Digital Visual Literacy. This was a challenging course for me but the content was something that will help me become a better Information Architect because it did teach me about visual design principles. One project involved analyzing the visual content of websites for adherence to principles of visual design; another analyzed different forms of digital media. One of my presentations is embedded below.
Public Libraries Topical Paper
For the Public Libraries course, I was given the opportunity to teach my peers about a topic of my choice. I chose to focus on a subject that I have some interest and experience with, disaster planning. As a former American Red Cross volunteer and a current amateur radio operator, I am fascinated by the ways in which libraries have risen to the occasion to serve their communities during natural disasters and other emergencies. The paper which I shared with my classmates is embedded below. I hope you enjoy it.
Professional Field Experience
This semester, I also had my Professional Field Experience internship at Portsmouth Free Public Library's Reference Department. My tasks included a collection management project of the entire Local History collection, as well as assisting with Tech Help Tuesdays; presentation of a digital information literacy program; and assisting with both the Adult and the YA Book Clubs. I also tended the Reference Desk while the librarians were at lunch, and helped out as needed. I enjoyed the opportunity to observe and participate in a small public library, after spending most of my recent years at academic and federal libraries. This experience had a big impact on my career goals. Please click the screenshot to visit my portfolio for this course.
Professional Field Experience Portfolio
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This portfolio page has been a good lesson to me in the importance of saving my work. I had some other examples that I wanted to show, such as my group project to create a Strategic Plan. However, I discovered that I unfortunately no longer have a copy of those due to a loss of the computer that I was using that semester, and can't retrieve them from the learning management system because they were submitted by a team member. I am also guilty of not following a good organzational system for my own work. I will definitely spend some time during winter break uploading the work that I wish to save to DropBox or another Cloud storage service, and applying what I have learned about the organization of information to properly organize my student work.
