Personal Narrative
Compartmentalized and succinct, although visually appealing, my portfolio is designed to not only be an extension of myself but to be convenient for the reader. The various sections of the portfolio such as Home, Statement of Integrity, About me, Personal Narrative, the subsequent required Core Competency Goals and contact information page are arranged in respective order on the top tab and have a corresponding bottom button to easily navigate. Since my second semester in the Library and Information Science graduate program, I met with advisors and put maximum effort into class projects designed to reflect the competency goals and thus my understanding of them.
In 2022, my junior year of a BA in history, I was unsure of how to apply my love of history to my life goal of expanding information accessibility. A sympathetic academic advisor suggested I take 3261 Introduction to Information Science, and it has led me to this program, my career, and completing my goals in life.
After graduating in 2023, I worked at Barbara S. Ponce Public Library, and gained an appreciation for hands-on library work, but knew I needed to enter USF’s MLIS program to understand the theory behind my role. 5020 Foundations of Library and Information Science in tandem with 6603 Basic Information Sources/Services grounded me, and true to their names, let me build off of that fundamental knowledge. Metadata, Boolean searches, the Dewey Decimal system, and reference librarianship all drew connections back to what I did at BSPPL. Although by that time I was working at Hit Promotional Products as a Proofreader, I still used these skills to better my research in subsequent assignments.
6409 Introduction to Library Administration gave me perspective on the services my library managers made sure we provided; the budget my Youth Services department was allotted; the statutes we had to abide by; the hard decisions librarians face every day. With the final project being a plan for a library program, including a budget, timeline, supplies, and a focus group to determine its patronage, I created a prospective Seed Garden plan. In line with that but with greater depth, the completion of a collection development policy and a breakdown of copyright policy, 6511 Collection Development and Maintenance, helped me understand our rigorous collection development policy for the Youth Services department and how they assessed the patron populations needs. Its deliberateness on space usage, building librarian and patron relationships and the emphasis on careful weeding out in the collection is critical to the librarianship I want to provide and understand.
While my history major taught me its research methods of historical theory and reading against the grain, 6271 Research Methods in Library and Information Science taught me quantitative vs qualitative research in a much more collaborative way through a multi-step group assignment which resulted in a full project proposal titled “Ethical Impacts of Artificial Intelligence in Archival Science” . 6671 Organization of knowledge was taken as I became a Records Specialist and immersed myself in indexing systems, an execution of the principles of metadata input and understanding, and allowed me to understand the significance of the folksonomies surrounding us that are known through social media osmosis. I analyzed them through my paper Folksonomies(tags and hashtags) as a knowledge organization tool. It was both this class and 5268 Technology for Information professionals elective that resulted in proficient digital literacy from the bottom up and resulted in a large project centering around digitization efforts and the technology of microfilm that many libraries and archives still have.
Although I am still completing my last semester, University of South Florida’s Library and Information Science program has given me the skills necessary to make sure my efforts in historical preservation can be freely accessed by the public. Empathy, ethics, and understanding are just a portion of what makes libraries great, and with this program and portfolio, I hope those goals are justly reflected.