Reflection & Analysis

One of the key components of my work as the coordinator African American Resource Center is to plan projects. It's a task that I've never done professionally before this job - although I like to think project planning is akin to lesson planning, which I do have a ton of professional experience doing. I was excited for this class, even before going in, so that I could gain a better understanding of project planning in libraries.

Projects are collaborative and are among the main ways that libraries are able to continue to grow and expand. Projects like the one I worked on with the group in this class provide a way for libraries to meet their community's needs in new ways to keep up with a changing information world. When working with community stakeholders, which can include community members, financial institutes, other nonprofit organizations, among others, libraries can more fully meet the wants of more people. 

This class brought together both undergraduate and graduate students in groups to plan projects by thinking through all of the facts of a project: from creating the objectives and goals, to identifying the project milestones and budget, to the timeline and communication plan. What I appreciated most about this project is that we worked within groups to determine a potential project from start to finish. We learned about technology needs, how to look for potential solutions to problems that came up, as well as determining potential management tools that could support the project. We divided up some aspects of the project based on our own strengths, but we worked together to flesh out the details in order to create a fully functioning proposal.

I also appreciated the focus on technology tools throughout the course. In between working with our partners, we were also tasked with researching and share technological tools that could be instrumental in supporting project management. Our work in public libraries is increasingly technological and is beginning to focus a lot more on community engagement as opposed to being a book repository, so this course helped to put my work into perspective a bit more.