Presentation 1
Community
Community
Deliverable to Canvas: Clickable URL to a slide presention with speaker notes for each slide. (Do not forget to make the link accessible/viewable to anyone)
Draft Project Due for Workshop 2; final presentation due on Canvas one week later
Third ed. textbook chapters 1–4
Product format: A Google Slide Presentation with speaker notes. Upload this to your portfolio after you receive your points in Canvas.
Goal: Create a product you could give/present to a interested/stakeholder group (administrator, board, principal) that describes the library you are studying including the organization or community of which it is a part, the patrons it serves, its collection, the needs or curriculum it serves, and how it tries to reach out to non-users. You will need to think through pre-pandemic and post pandemic.
Product: A Google Slide presentation with speaker notes.
In this product you are trying to understand the institution you are studying, and the patrons whom you consider your target for information services. There are three major parts of the product after the introduction.
INTRODUCTION: Here are some of the questions or topics you may address:
Describe the library and its organization briefly (such as that found in a college catalog or descriptive brochure about the institution).
What are the goals of the institution? Has the library been reinventing itself recently? In what ways?
Who are the expected patrons of the library? All the people in the community? All the students who register? The engineers in the firm?
PART ONE: What demographics describe the potential patrons of your library? Describe the type of community, socioeconomic status, culture, racial mix, types of jobs available, industry or lack of, rural/suburban, etc. Give statistics, include charts or graphs. Remember that for this first part of the product you are trying to describe the entire population who could use your services. Such information is often readily available so look for such a description in the documents issued by your institution. If there is no such information, interview people in the know until you feel you have a handle on the population. You might use the 2010 federal census for demographic data or data available from city/county/state governments. American FactFinder from the U.S. Census Bureau is a helpful tool.
PART TWO: In the second part of the product, describe the patrons who actually use the library. This will be a subset of the total potential patron reservoir. Cover who comes, why they come. Also describe groups that don't come and why they don't come. Remember to think of both walk-in folks and electronic visitors. Some libraries may have already conducted a use study or keep statistics about those who visit. You'll be lucky if you find such data. You might have to do some interviewing to find this out. Try to talk to people who might know such as persons who have been with the library for a long time - those who observe those coming and going. You might do a brief questionnaire to user groups or nonuser groups. Talk to nonusers in places where they congregate. Since the physical library may have been closed, you will have to concentrate on persons visiting the library digitally.
I don't expect you to do a major study, but imagine what it would be like if you had to conduct such a study over a period of several months. How would you go about it and how would you make sure you could trust the data you were collecting?
PART THREE: Finally, in the product, discuss the discrepancy between the actual users and the potential users. Why is there a gap? How big is the gap? What do you think has caused the gap? What do you think could be done to close the gap? Is the collection itself the cause of the gap? Is it the atmosphere? The library staff? The location? Access rules? What implications does this product have for the person in charge of collection development?
Compare and Contrast: At the end of your product, discuss what our class has learned about your type of library and then libraries in general. This information will be contained on your last two slides.
Schools or colleges (academic institutions): You need to know the majors and courses that are taught in your institution, and the major topics in those courses that are likely to require an information-rich environment. This is often an overwhelming task if the institution is very large. Start with a college catalog, a list of courses, textbooks used in those courses, curriculum outlines, school handbooks. You may have to interview persons teaching in the institution to get a better idea of what is really taught vs. what is listed as being taught. Course descriptions in college catalogs are so brief that they are only hints and not what you would really need. I do not expect you to become an expert in the "curriculum" at this time, but you should be able to get well enough acquainted that you can write intelligently about it. In your presentation, try to describe the curriculum the best you can. Brief examples are fine.
In the second part of this product, take a look at a single course of instruction and list the major topics covered in that course. For example, an American History course might cover Colonial Period, Revolution, Civil War, 20th century, etc. This will demonstrate to the professor that you understand the curriculum as a whole and can look into a single course for topics that are likely to be covered in depth. The textbook or course outline will often be helpful in looking at a course.
Public/special libraries (Needs Assessment): You should try to find out what type of information-rich environment would help the patrons of your library succeed. This is often called a needs assessment or user analysis. Try to see if your library has already done some sort of needs study. Many do. You might need to conduct a few brief interviews of the patrons. This might include both users and nonuser groups. You might seek people who are "in the know" rather than just random selection. Since I do not expect you to conduct a formal and thorough needs assessment yourself, try to envision how you might do this and act as though you had done something in a formal study. It would be nice to have a quarterly random sample of our entire patron base answer a few pointed questions so we could chart progress over time and spot new needs as they evolve. In your presentation, describe and summarize the needs that you have discovered. Convince me (an outsider) that you understand your patrons - both those that come and those who could - and that you can anticipate what information/materials they require before they walk in the door (real or electronic).