December 2020 Archives
Posted December 17, 2020
Hey everyone. It’s been a long time since I last posted a blog. My semester has been pretty crazy as I imagine everyone else’s has been. Trying to keep up with the election, the pandemic, and continuing classes fulltime has been pretty stressful so I began to limit the amount of time I am on social media each week to basically zero which has been pretty helpful I would say. In my Collective Memory course, our final project was a group presentation on a historical event, person, or group that our understanding of has been affected by the idea of collective memory. My group chose to do our project our Crispus Attucks, the first victim of the Boston Massacre, and how his identity as a runaway slave and martyr helped with the abolitionists and even in the Black Lives Matter protests. In Archival Access, our final project is to create a MARC record and Finding Aid for a collection. We’ve been learning about how to create Finding Aids with XML code and MARC records so…
Posted December 16, 2020
I am almost done with my last paper for the year. I just need to double check that all my citations were done correctly, and then I’ll be all set to turn it in! I had to choose six books (three nonfiction and three fiction) to include in my library’s collection. To do this, I read fiction and nonfiction book reviews from the January 2020 issues of Booklist and School Library Journal. It was a much more daunting task than I had anticipated. A lot of books were reviewed, especially fiction books, and it was overwhelming. Luckily, I printed out the reviews so I could write myself some notes. I highlighted the most important parts of the reviews and noted my overall impressions of whether to book would make a good addition to the collection or not. Otherwise, all the reviews would have run together. I was impressed with the variety of books that were reviewed. There were many genres and books that featured diverse or marginalized voices. I recognized several of the titles, but there were many more that I didn’t know about. I added several books to…
Posted December 14, 2020
Can you believe it’s almost the end of the semester? The end of the semester is always such a crazy time, with due dates and projects. Since my last post, I’ve had two assignments due, and my big semester-long project is due next week. It is definitely crunch time! As I discussed in an earlier post, my semester-long project is the Electronic Resources in Libraries Case Study Project where we do a thorough investigation of an academic library’s electronic resources offering with a partner. My team is investigating the resources of MCPHS University, as that is where both of us work. It’s a huge project—we’ve had to interview the electronic resources librarian, thoroughly investigate the databases, the research guides, the different ways to search the library’s resources, and more. My team has been working really diligently throughout the semester and having regular virtual meetings to check in and go over our project, so we’re doing pretty well progress-wise. I’m not too worried about our actual written report, the thing that I am nervous about is our presentation. I’ve done plenty of presentations at Simmons;…
Posted December 7, 2020
This week has been crazy busy, especially Wednesday. For my first time working almost full time while in grad school, balancing school and work this semester has been hard. And this struggle is only with only one class! Next week is my last weekly meeting for the semester-long group project in my Information Services for Diverse Users course. This project has been an interesting study on how to work with the information needs of those who have low digital literacy skills. Work at the elementary school library is now very busy. Instead of 3-5 kids having library class once a week and checking out books during library class, kids get a book as soon as they return a book. So, if a student returns a book they finished reading on Tuesday, then they will get a new library book when they are back in school on Friday. This is more work for me and keeps me running down the halls to bring books to each of the classrooms! By the time I finished running around…
Posted December 2, 2020
I’m on to my third (and last!) paper of the semester. It’s not due until December 15 but I want to complete it early so I can get it done and enjoy the holidays. Plus, the assignment has several parts and is better done one step at a time. The assignment incorporates much of what we’ve learned in class throughout the semester, and deals with collections development, which I love. In the first part of the assignment, we choose a library and examine its collections development policy. Each library has a unique collections development policy that explains how it will build its collection. The policy is heavily geared towards the library’s community. For example, a school library will tailor its collections development policy towards its students, and a public library will tailor its policy towards its community. If a community has a large Spanish speaking population, the library might focus on buying Spanish language materials, whereas a community that does not have a large Spanish speaking population would not focus on this area. This is where the community statistics from the census come…
