This planning portfolio was developed and curated during the completion of ISCI 729: Academic Libraries at the University of South Carolina, spring semester of 2025. This portfolio will support my future endeavors in academic librarianship as each component helped me better refine what position within academic libraries I am interested in pursuing, how I can best serve the needs of both my current faculty and students, and how to best anticipate the needs of future faculty, students, and patrons at an academic level. The assignments on the next pages, presented as artifacts, demonstrate who I am as a librarian, as well as my core values and ethics. The process and thoughtfulness that went into each artifact shaped my understanding of the areas of specialization and the levels of professional development within librarianship.
Academic librarianship, to me, should be a faculty role in that all members of the library staff should be able to instruct and guide students through the research processes and lifecycle. The first artifact, Librarian Scholarship, helped me expand my understanding on the differences between tenure, librarian, and faculty status. It also allowed me to discover that I'm not actually interested in the tenure track of it all, but I do like the concept of shaping the world of libraries through studies and creation of scholarly communications. The second artifact, Faculty Support, allowed me to shape current goals within my institution into theoretical concepts that I could develop into LibGuides. The third artifact, Student Support, was designed to help librarians better understand the elements within the research lifecycle and how they could support and develop students skills within research. My greatest takeaway from this course is that once librarians embed themselves as librarians in their academic institution, one can become an active part of not only the student's day-to-day life, but the lifecycle of information and how students engage with information.