Leadership

During my last few quarters at the i-School, I have become more and more confident in my ability to take on leadership roles as a student and as a burgeoning professional.   As I continue to become more comfortable with professional activities and discourse, I feel compelled to share what I have learned.

iPeer

Last year, I have joined the i-Peer program, where I mentor two first-year  i-School students and assist them with any questions they may have about the program.   When I was an i-School newbie, I found my i-Peer mentor to be an invaluable resource for everything from what kind of computer I should buy to managing the intense first quarter workload.  Now that I near graduation, I feel confident in my ability to act as a leader in my profession.  By helping other students excel as librarians, I am able to demonstrate this skill.

SharePoint Policy Library

At my current job at City University Library in Bellevue, I had the opportunity to put my knowledge organization skills to work in creating an online repository for all of the university’s policies.   To accomplish this, I needed to step outside of my role as library assistant and lead a team of people.  We planned and executed the project from scratch, and because of my experience with taxonomies, I emerged as a leader.

Working closely with the Provost, Executive Assistant to the President, as well as other library staff members, I developed a plan that included uploading and formatting hundreds of policy documents and making them findable for a variety of university stakeholders.  In order to succeed, I had to learn as much about SharePoint as I possibly could.  I conducted an extensive literature review, consulted with experts and experimented with many different organization models before deciding on a model.  The other team members and I agreed that the best choice involved assigning each policy document with a set of standardized metadata tags.  These tags allowed documents to be grouped together in a variety of ways, depending on the end-users needs and preferences.  We also devised a numeric classification scheme that would also allow the documents to be logically ordered.

I was pleased to be able to apply my knowledge of taxonomy and knowledge organization in a situation where it was needed.  The other members of my team were pleased, as well.  Our SharePoint site is now a functioning policy library, where documents are standardized and accessable–a great improvement over their prior state.

CityU Library Staff