Program Learning Outcome 7

Connecting people to information is what we do.

In LIS 610 we had a major group project to create a collection for a library and we were grouped by what type of librarianship we wanted to go into. My group immediately wanted to do multicultural resources for kids and we broke that down into reasonable chunks. I gladly did the teen section. Our goal was to focus on resources that focused on Black and Latinx communities. This project encompassed a variety of mediums, including audiobooks, blogs, and podcasts. Larger public libraries often have great online book lists for teens. The Los Angeles Public Library does an amazing job with these and it is the kind of thing that I would love to have on a school library website. This is a great way to condense a lot of information into one place that patrons can easily find.

I created a video in LIS 620 that showed students how to search on EBSCO and NCLive. This video was built specifically for a private school I know well that had special needs when it came to using databases. Making a screencast video was an easy way to allow the students to see what I was doing step-by-step. The idea was to have that located on the school resources page (in a portal) on demand. This way, a teacher could link to it in their class pages, or students could know how to find it themselves.

The Portrait of a Collaborator helps the rest of a school's faculty get a quick introduction to who you are and what you can do. This would be a great thing to use in an introductory email and then sent to any new teachers that come in. The goal is to encourage them to come to you and to know that you are there to help make their lives a little easier. Collaboration in schools is a wonderful tool, but it is one that has to be built with a whole lot of trust and patience. Collaboration is about relationships and even the best media specialist will struggle if they haven't "established credibility within the school" (Diana G. Murphy as quoted in Buzzeo, 2002).