Use the basic concepts and principles related to the selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation of physical and digital information items; A satisfactory statement of competency – Demonstrates understanding of the concepts that comprise the management of collections of data or objects, including selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation Apply collection management principles for both physical and digital content.
An important aspect of the information professional’s job is to connect people to both physical and digital information and be able to apply collection management principles. It is the librarian's responsibility to provide informational materials by selecting, organizing and preserving as well as evaluating how to manage data. This can be demonstrated in my experience joining a research team through my program called the IDNA(International Directory of National Archives). By conducting research on various countries and their documentary heritage, our team addresses the challenges of managing and preserving national archives unique to each country. Another way to show my competency is a website I had created that shows a digital collection of best poetry I have compiled into a table. This demonstrates my ability to create an HTML table used to logically structure and present data.
Justification of the Evidence
Evidence #1: IDNA Project
I was given the opportunity to join an online research team one summer through the SJSU iSchool and gathered data for a national archives project by researching several assigned countries in order to manage and preserve international documentary heritage worldwide. By applying collection management principles I am able to complete a template for each country(an example of Senegal as evidence is provided in a link below) that outlines several key concepts such as its history(about how its national archival repository may have been first established). The template gives an overview of the state of the archives today in the country, its mission statement, the internal and external structure of the archive, its digital infrastructures as well as any current focus or spotlight about its collection. Through this experience, I can demonstrate my understanding of concepts that make up how collections are put together, evaluated, and preserved for a wide audience who wish to access this valuable information.
Evidence #2: HTML Table
In this example, I provide a screenshot of an HTML semantic table using a basic table structure considering classes, background-colors, background images, and borders, as well as other essential aspects of organizing digital content. As I consider the table structure I create, I want to organize information so that items are nested in an order that is easy to access and visually intuitive for the audience. Another principle applied here is to keep in mind validation errors that can occur when lists in tables are not nested properly in an element. Though not thematically a library example, by principle, this experience allows me to develop my ability to evaluate information and to apply concepts related to selecting and organizing physical data into a digital format in order to preserve a particular collection.
Conclusion
The ability to take information and organize it into a digital(or physical) collection is central to a librarian's role in the profession. To take a massive amount of data and translate that into collection development requires these basic concepts of selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation. Recently, I have heard of the significant emergence of “big data” that requires special analysis on trends, associations and patterns in large companies(including libraries) and my plan is to take some intro courses at the UC Berkeley extension in order to explore more complex data sets and apply that to my library profession.