One Month Left

Posted November 18, 2020 by Amie Grosshans

            I was surprised when I looked at Moodle the other day and saw that there were only four more weeks left in the semester.  It’s only three weeks of class, though, since there are no readings or assignments over Thanksgiving.  It’s really getting down to the wire!  I have two papers to write between now and the end of the semester, and luckily both of them are very interesting.  

The paper due first deals with analyzing a fictional library’s collection of young adult materials.  To do this, we’ll be using a spreadsheet from our shared Google drive.  The spreadsheet is a list of 25 books and corresponding information about publication dates, checkout data, renewal data, and various circulation information.  We can use this information to determine a lot of about the collection, including which books are the most popular, the least popular, or the oldest.  We can also use it to find areas of the collection that need to be weeded or expanded, or to deduce whether the collection is adequately meeting the needs of the community.  But this assignment deals specifically with analyzing how diverse the collection is, so we have to look at which authors and/or main characters are LGBTQ+, or a part of a religious or ethnic minority.  I absolutely love this type of work.  I just find it so interesting to analyze this type of data.  I am looking forward to starting the assignment and seeing how the fictional collection shapes up.