Day 18, Hour 90

Today I did most of my work in collection development. Since most of my policy research has been collected and compiled, and can start to focus on a great monograph and video collection for the library. I am going to continue working diligently on this until my final hours here!

My policy wiki has been graded, and though the content was thorough (for the most part) I seem to have missed the mark on the tone of the entire document. Many of the writing choices I made were not particularly what my professor was looking for, and I understand that. I wish I had thought more about this before I completed it. However, Andy is still interested in the wiki, so I will make some changes to give the document more of a professional tone. In general, however, it is mostly finished.

I think I will soon email my off-site practicum adviser, Dr. Roland, about my final project. I want to inform him of all of the research and collection development I have been doing, and to ask him how exactly it would be best to submit the work. As of now, documents of my work are included in the wiki I created for this practicum. Hopefully this will be a sufficient record of all of my work here.

Coming up next: I would like to continue with collection development (I have moved on to 1989, when there were only 9 inductees), to revise my policy wiki, and to begin work on the "Assessment of Learning Experience" paper, which is a reflection of my practicum that is due as part of the final project. Time is winding down...

Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

Laura

Day 14, Hour 70

Today was the day I finally sent out my policy survey...and I was nervous! I must have checked, double-checked, and triple-checked each email I sent out, making sure that I cc'd Andy, I attached the survey, and I spelled the person's name correctly. It is both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to know that your name is going to be out in front of experts in your field. The shocking and pleasant part of the whole experience is that within an hour and a half, I had already received four responses!

Since last week, I have also been doing a lot of work at home on the policy and procedure wiki that I created. I decided to scrap the mock website I was working on, since wikis are so much more accessible; I can work on a wiki from any computer with an internet connection, and I can send access permissions out to anyone I choose to. Since I also have a wiki for this practicum (through Wikispaces.com), which I have a paid subscription for, I am able to control the security of my pages. These are all reasons why I am so in favor of wikis! (You can check out a post I wrote for another blog on wikis here.)

I finished up my day by working on some collection development. I was happy to discover that the list of inductees for 1988 is much shorter than the previous years, so hopefully I will be able to get a lot more of the inductees list finished than I thought. I also was able to search more effectively thanks to a site I found called GoodReads.com that offers a wealth of user reviews.

Coming up next: I will be continuing with collection development, and hopefully--if more responses keep coming in--will start compiling the results of my survey. With each day I spend here, the time seems as though it is moving faster and faster...

Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

Laura

Day 6, Hour 30

This is really starting to feel official! The practicum, I mean. I submitted my first report to my SLIS advisor (to be completed after 25 hours) regarding my final paper/project for this experience. We have a choice, so I've decided to do a combination of the two.

I think that the nature of my practicum, which involves both collection development and policy/procedure development, lends itself well to the combination of a paper and a project. I have already gathered some great research on policy and procedure, which will lend itself well to a discussion paper. I will also include this blog and the wiki I have created in the project portion, as well as a mock website containing my final ideas for policy and procedure. As for the collection development portion, I will have several Excel documents that include the items I have suggested to the library for purchase, as well as a reflection paper on the collection development process.

After three weeks, I can say that I am really enjoying my time here. The topics I am dealing with are interesting and compelling, and I am getting a sneak peek into what goes into the opening of a brand new library. I have met some great people so far, and I look forward to learning all that I can from them.

Up next: I submitted some suggestions and questions to Andy, and I am hoping speak with him next week about policy. Once I get some more concrete ideas, I will be able to put that information into my mock website!

Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

Laura

Day 2, Hour 10

It is Day 2 of my practicum at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library, and I did some great research and other basic work toward my end experience.

I started today by creating a working list of notes, which is really just a collection of questions I come up with as I think about what the user experience will look like from start to finish. Today, I was mostly considering membership and who that would be extended to. For instance, Andy and I discussed that students would be able to use the library, and I was assuming he meant Tri-C students, since the library is on their campus. However, I was thinking that membership should be extended to all Northeast Ohio college students. Could we also include other regional college and high school students, faculty, and staff?

This is not to say that the library will not be open to the public, which it will. However, there is a question of membership and whether or not the library will charge for it. I think a good policy would be to offer membership for free or at a discounted rate for students, faculty, and staff of regional institutions. This would allow for the fostering of great research skills in an interesting and important subject field.

I also began researching information on libraries that allow for lending of materials to patrons on-site, but do not all borrowing off-site. It seems as though this is the policy for many academic research libraries, and for university libraries who allow "unaffiliated users" to utilize their facilities (in many universities, unaffiliated users--such as those who do not fall into the category of students, faculty, or staff--are allowed to utilize materials in the library but cannot check them out). I gathered citations and abstracts from several articles that expound on this subject, and I have begun to analyze the information to come up with a policy on lending for the Rock Hall Library.

Lastly, I created a wiki that I will share with my practicum supervisors and advisor that will contain pertinent information about the work I complete this semester. I made a calendar with dates of deadlines and created spaces to publish my notes and research bibliographies, and a place to keep track of my practicum hours, as well. All in all, I feel like I accomplished quite a bit today!

Coming up next: I will continue to work on my wishlist for inductees next Tuesday. I am finding that through my research for that, I am able to add some titles to my DVD wishlist, as well. Sometimes going off on a tangent can be a good thing!

Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

Laura