Professional Philosophy
My graduation from Lake Forest College, May 2021
About Me
I was born on September 25, 1998, in Chicago to my parents Fran and Mike Pease. When I was six months old, my family moved to Lake Forest, IL, where I would spend the bulk of my life through high school, and even after I left I would continue my education there. I attended Lake Forest College from 2017-2021, graduating with a BA in political science.
My career in library information science goes back to high school, when I worked as a page at the Lake Forest Library. Up to that point, I had long loved visiting the library, viewing it as a place where I may escape from the outside world to do things from homework, reading books, and searching the internet among other things. Therefore, it made sense that my first job would be in a library. Even when I left for college, my parents always believed a career in the library and information science field would be perfect for me, and I finally decided in the spring of 2022 to pursue that, and since then I have been part of the MLIS program at Dominican University in River Forest, IL, which I am expected to complete by August, 2023.
Professional Philosophy
At the Highland Park Public Library, we have comprehensive strategic goals. Our vision statement is as follows:
The community’s trusted forum for enrichment and engagement.
During the planning process, we affirmed that this vision statement represents the Library’s aspirations
for the community in relationship with the Library. Building trust between the Library and community is
the center of everything we do and important to community members that frequently mentioned the
lack of trust and divisions in our society. We want the community to know they can count upon the
Library – trust us – to be a place for enrichment and engagement for all aspects of their lives.
Alongside our vision, our mission is to:
Opening doors to information and imagination.
We also affirmed our mission, which we believe clearly states how we will carry out our work to achieve
our vision. We open doors to enriching lives, educating minds, and engaging with our community. All
are invited in to learn, discover, create, and connect. Everything that we do ties back to our mission.
We recognized that we needed to make some structural changes to our current plan, so the following
plan represents many of the same key concepts as our previous plan but is organized in a different way
to be more descriptive regarding what we want to achieve and how we will achieve it. We’ve used the
following components in our restructured plan:
Aspiration: The impact we want to have in our community.
Goal: The focus of our work that will help us realize our aspiration.
Tactics: The key areas we will work in to attain our goal, supported by
an activity plan to guide plan implementation (developed by
staff after adoption of the strategic plan).
The points made in these statements are what I am sworn to uphold and fulfill to the best of my ability as a member of the library and the community at large, and they align greatly with my own personal values. I believe librarians and those in related fields are obligated to aid their communities and the people in them in whatever they may need. This, of course, includes the flow of books and other materials which may be circulated, but goes much further than that.
It is the duty of those at the library to provide information pertaining to the community which the people need most. This includes resources for matters such as unemployment or social security, connections to organizations such as for the homeless, and hosting events which will bring patrons together such as book readings, concerts, movie screenings, and much more.