And the Portfolio Begins

Blogger at the Beach

Hello and welcome to my blog and MLIS portfolio!  My name is Mahrya, and I am beginning my third year at the University of Washington’s iSchool. In order to have my MLIS in hand by next spring, I need to create a document that shows what I’ve been doing professionally over the last couple years, how I’ve been preparing myself for librarianship and generally honing my skills.  There are five areas in which I need to establish my competency: training/teaching experience, leadership, practical/service experience, intellectual argument and use of technology.  It’s time to throw off the cover and face the looming spectre!  As of today, I’ve started culling my experiences, pulling old projects out of the dustbin and scrolling the memory backwards to remember what I’ve done in the past couple years.  Maybe I’ll have one or two of these five areas under control.  This first step is daunting, but I’m finding that I’ve actually got quite a bit of experience behind me.  But I’ve also got a ways to go. 

I’ve chosen to use this WordPress blog as my storage bin for the time being.  In this way, I can write about the portfolio creation process (as well as the librarian making process) with hopes that I don’t forget anything crucial along the way.  At some point, I may delete or archive these old entries to make this blog more portfolio-like.  I might also migrate the folio to a hand-coded HTML document instead.  This would allow me to demonstrate my technology competency and spend some quality time coding, which I secretly find very satisfying. Honestly, though, I’m not sure if my rudimentary HTML skills can match the elegance of a page created with a readymade blogging tool.  We’ll just have to see.

As long as I’m explaining myself, I should probably actually explain a little about myself. When I started the iSchool in 2006, I had a vague idea that I wanted to work at preserving old things.  I love museums, thrift stores, old postcards, magazines, advertisements, filmstrips and records, and the thought of being around these things for a living excited me.  I was working in a law firm at the time, and while wrangling massive, scattered document collections, I realized that I was interested in finding out about the best ways to organize information. 

Two years and many classes later, I’ve realized that information organization really is my bag.  I’ve done quite a bit of cataloging, taxonomy building and surrogate creating, and I Iove the intricate process of carefully describing a document so that it can be found and understood. I still love old things, too, and I’m currently interested in digitizing rare collections so that people can experience them from wherever they happen to live. 

If you’re still reading this, welcome to my portfolio-in-process.  Check back often to see what I’ve been up to and feel free to offer comments (preferrably encouraging ones).