There have been a couple projects where I have had to apply management principles and practices to manage projects. Using management principles have gone into every project or paper I had to do during my MLIS but one project where they were used to lay out a plan was the Strategic Plan written in IST 672 Public Libraries as Institutions. For this project I must step into the shoes of a library leader and planner and come up with a strategic plan that would fit a local library in my area. I had to design a plan to tackle a social injustice, perform a SWOT analysis of the library and the plan then formulate goals and outcomes for the project. This project was primarily management principals and I look forward to a leadership role in my future work.

If someone has power they should definitely use it to push for equity and justice, one such project that sees me in a somewhat position of power is the Final Report to Partner Librarian Project in IST 613 Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment. The position of power I am in is as a student getting to work with the library director of a local library, this is allowing me to give a recommended report to someone with the capacity to make a change. The Equity and Justice I am advocating for is a library service for more multilingual materials and programs. Currently the library director has told me that he notices they have very little but have a lot of other things that need to be investigated before this so I will be looking into it and using my position to advocate and plan.

Making sure decisions are made ethically can be tricky when not thinking about it. One project that has given me the knowledge to do this was the Disability History or Social Model Presentation project from IST 564 Accessible Lib & Info Services. This project saw me looking at the Social Model of disability, the project dove into the questions of “what is a disability” and how to view disabilities with the social model. This knowledge was used in many other projects of IST 564.

The project that most fits this PLO is the Advocacy Essay from IST 511 Cultural Foundation of Information Studies. For this project I primarily used creative thinking to advocate for Native American cultural materials in libraries. I found evidence as to why this would be good for the Native American community to have these materials outside of reservation libraries. The full argument was a cultural depository of materials that would be chosen by local tribes and cared for my library staff in collaboration with the tribes.

So far there have been three instances of meeting with colleagues who are already out and working in the library field. One project that I found the most informative and useful was the Library Leader Interview from IST 717 Library Leadership & Management. For this project I met with the library director of the public library system in my town and was able to interview her about leadership and management practices and styles in the library. She also, after the interview, brought me around and showed me the library and introduced me to other staff and to one staff member in particular. This was their special collections librarian since I mentioned my interest in archiving and special collections, from this meeting we shared emails and contact info.

Again for this PLO one project comes to mind and that is the Final Report to Partner Librarian Project in IST 613. With any plan for a service public relation and development and marketing are a very important part to making sure a program or service gets the traffic and use you want it to. For this project my marketing plan is to utilize the library Facebook page, Friends of the Library contacts, and their newsletter. Since the program is a Multilingual Book Club and the library already successfully has book clubs it is easy to piggyback on that marketing, and also easy for the library rather than have to come up with completely new ways to get the word out about the service.

This entire cycle is what I would love to do as a future job, two projects from my days in my Undergraduate program can be used here. One was a Historical internship working with a Native American Lithic Collection, and the other was designing an online catalog for the same collection. During these two projects I oversaw the entire information lifecycle from writing tags for the artifacts after examining them, inputting the information from the tags into a catalog on the computer, to developing an organization system to showcase the artifacts online and bring access to them digitally. The curation aspect comes from creating 2 online exhibits one about the arrow heads in the collection and the other an overview of the collection’s history, who put it together, and its life cycle.