Project Time!

Posted October 19, 2020 by Sarah Callanan

Can you believe that we are six weeks in to the semester?  Six weeks!  We’re almost halfway done with the Fall 2020 semester everyone!  

As promised, this post is going to be all about the semester-long project in LIS 454: Digital Information Services and Providers.  Our big project is an Electronic Resources in Libraries Case Study Project, where we split up in to teams to do a thorough investigation of an academic library’s electronic resources offerings and management.  We interview the library’s electronic resources librarian and learn more about the workflow, operation specifics and skills needed for managing electronic resources, and learn more about the library itself.  We will ultimately write a case study report based on the interview and investigate how the electronic resources are described and introduced on the website, how everything is connected and covered in research guides and tutorials online, and what library services are provided and offered.   This project really reminds me of LIS 453: Collection Development and Management, except for this project we are solely focusing on electronic resources and the role of the electronic resources librarian. 

My partner for this project and I actually work for the same library, so it’s been a lot of fun!  The first part of our project was to come up with our interview questions, and that was due this week.  We had to focus our interview questions on three main areas—job responsibilities, skill set necessary to be an electronic resources librarian, and future trends.  One of the important topics that we wanted to ask about was how COVID-19 has changed the job and electronic resources management in general, and how it may change the way libraries use, view, and manage electronic resources in the future.  One of the great things about this project is actually setting up and doing the interview itself.  It gives us great experience with informational interviewing and networking.  As my project partner and I work together, we have chosen to base our project on the library where we work, and interview our electronic resources librarian, so setting up the interview was a bit less daunting.   As we just completed writing our interview questions, we haven’t done the interview itself yet so that’s something to look forward to!  

I’m really enjoying working on this project, and I’ll keep you posted on our progress throughout the semester!