Mar 05, 2018 Oh Wow It’s Already March: Project and Life Updates

Hello again, lovely people! I hope your New Year is going well, whether you celebrate the Western solar new year, or the Lunar New Year. I happen to celebrate both. Double trouble!

I don’t have much to update on my project rotation. I’m doing reference. I’m doing instruction. Pretty standard stuff. I guess an interesting update is my process for making subject guides for the disciplines I handle. I have created a standard template that I will use for every single subject guide I create. This template includes information on how to do background research on a subject, how to find books, how to find articles, and how to find statistics. I made some guides for Ethnic Studies, and I sent them to the faculty members before I published them. One suggestion they gave me was to include faculty publications, which I was more than happy to do! This has allowed me to finally do some collection development and purchasing when we don’t have something a faculty member has written.

One of my guiding principles is to include patrons/end users in whatever I do, every step of the way. As much as I might think I know what they might want or what is the best way to do something, I still hold so much power over how they access the information. I want to make that power as compassionate and open as possible.

I am also very excited to update you on my Emerging Leaders appointment. As previously posted, I was chosen for the 2018 class of ALA Emerging Leaders. My group is amazing, and I actually already knew two people. We were assigned the project proposal of the American Indian Library Association. If you didn’t know, yes, there is an American Indian Library Association. There are tribal libraries. And in fact, one point of our project is to help advocate for tribal libraries and inform non-tribal librarians of all the cool stuff they do. Our project is to create a directory/digital advocacy tool of all the tribal libraries, archives, and museums in the country. We are still in the “well, what platform are we going to use and what information are we going to include” phase, but I have high hopes for this resource.

I also have been selected as one of the interns for CAPC, which is the Cataloging Policy Committee of OLAC. I won’t start my work until after ALA Annual. You can read more about the committee on the OLAC website.

I had a bit of a hectic month. I know others did as well. I am looking forward to what these next few months bring.

Original Article