Now Presenting

On Monday, I have my first real librarian interview at the library where I’m currently employed.   All week I’ve been practicing my presentation skills in the shower and holding mock Q&A’s in the car.   Hopefully, by Monday I’ll be ready to put the jitters aside and rock this thing.  One component of the interview is to deliver a 2o-minute example of information literacy instruction.  Preparing for the instruction has actually been really rewarding. I’ve found some great methods and criteria for evaluating internet resources, and it’s been fun thinking of how to present them. Anyway, here’s my PowerPoint:

Evaluating Web Sources For Research

View more presentations from mahrya. (tags: information literacy)

I would really love to hear any feedback about my slides or any suggestions people may have for preparing. Wish me luck!

Hiatus Concluded

It’s been awhile, dear blogland friends!  And while the last three months have been no slough, I don’t have a valid excuse for abandoning you…all three of you, that is.  I’m back in school again and need to finish the portfolio for which I set up this blog.  Eloise and I devised a metadata schema last semester that will look nice in the technology section, I think.   I learned XML for the occasion, and I’m glad I did.  With such extensibility and wide use, there’s no excuse not to. 

Besides the portfolio, I’ve been reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, which has been on my reading list forever.  As someone who’s interested in the details of search, classification and usability, the book has been a nice step back, a big picture kind of read.   I do take issue with Weinberger’s polarized view of folksonomy v. taxonomy and his opinion is the former is inherently better in a digitized world.   I will have to revisit this issue, though, because I’m only half way through the book.

Fits and Starts

Photo by |ÇP|. Obtained via Flickr Creative Commons on 8/08/08

I’m working again today on the professional documents section, but technology keeps failing me. Well, it’s not exactly failing me, but certainly tweaking my nose and pulling on my ears. So, I’m not going to have that section posted today after all. I was trying to turn our subject term thesaurus into an HTML document so that I could link to it from the portfolio, but because we created it in Word and used all sorts of tables and fancy formatting, it made a hideous web page. Then, I decided to make it into a PDF, but since the thing tops 120 pages, it kept crashing my FTP client. Grrrr, I think I’ll just have to share excerpts of the thesaur, since its so big.

But speaking of the thesaurus project, it has been one of my favorite things I’ve done at the iSchool so far. I was able to work with three amazing people on a controlled vocabulary about booze, and it turns out that they were just as geekily obsessed with CV’s as I am. We spent many a Tuesday evening IM-ing away about term relationships and upward posting. It turned out wonderfully and was so much fun to work on. Once I actually get excerpts of the thing web ready, you will be able to see it for yourselves.

So Many Papers

Today, I’m picking out my best papers and projects to include in the Intellectual Argument/Professional Documents section of the folio.  So far, I have a few projects that seem to fit the professional document bill, but I need examples with a little bit more intellectual heft, a little more meat.  More meat!  I think I’m going to include a cataloging paper I completed last year, as well as a subject thesaurus group project and a collection development policy group project.  The CD policy looks especially slick, due in no small part to the internal hyperlinks and subtle color scheme.  Who needs substance when you’ve got formatting, right?  I’m hoping to have that page done soon and posted.   

Speaking of collection development (and unrelated to portfolio making), I was talking to one of the selector librarians at work about running a report that shows a breakdown of our current collection by LC subject heading.  This would be really helpful for ordering.  Our primary vendor allows us to sort its holdings by subject heading, so we could use a report of our holdings to identify coverage gaps and order new books accordingly.  The cataloger in me is interested in seeing a snapshot of our most and least popular subject headings.  Oh, that durn cataloger in me.

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).