First Reflection

Spring 2025 

Working as a Graduate Research Assistant at the OU-Tulsa Schusterman Library has greatly provided me with opportunities to practice and apply concepts that I have been learning in my courses. For example, I worked toward one of my goals to cultivate skills in the development of policies and procedures (PLG 1.2) in Management in Information Organizations. In this course, we learned about the processes and development of strategic plans. Concurrently, I joined the Strategic Plan Working Group at the Schusterman Library and applied this knowledge to real-life practices as I have worked alongside our Assistant Director and Reference and Instruction Librarians to conduct stakeholder feedback for our strategic plan (ALA 4C, SLO 3). Conducting this stakeholder research has also allowed me to build on the content from my Research and Evaluation Methods course. I have been able to apply the IRB training and survey construction knowledge I had gained from this course to survey and analyze results, understand the library’s patrons and their needs, and provide a basis for our library's strategic plan (ALA 7B, SLO 3). This experience helped me progress my goal to explore and apply my understanding of ethical considerations and guidelines in research (PLG 3.2).

I have also experienced using course knowledge to aid patrons at my library in their search for information. Through coming to understand the back-end, technological means of resource searching through Fundamentals of Information Technology, I have been able to better understand how search terms, Booleans, and search filters retrieve information which has helped me teach students how to search for literature (SLO 4, PLG 4.1). The sociology of information seeking from Information Seeking and Use has certainly expanded my resource searching and selecting abilities by helping me understand the audience I am working with, their current understanding of information seeking, and how to use information seeking behaviors to reach researchers where they are at in their researching skills (PLG 4.2, ALA 6A, ALA 6B). Applying what I learned in the Organization of Information course has helped me understand cataloging, subjects headings, and other elements of object description and how this can be used to provide a higher level of accessibility and discoverability (PLG 2.2, ALA 5C). Information and Society has helped me understand the role of information and knowledge professionals in the knowledge society (SLO 1), ethical issues in information (PLG 3.1), and allowed me to leverage my knowledge of information behaviors to help patrons accomplish their research goals in the fields of medicine, history, and literature (PLG 4.2).