Information literacy is our entire profession, and it is important to show that we are Information Professionals have these skills and know how to use them. Being able to identify a lack of information literacy in users to help where they are lacking and provide useful information is key. To that end the Reference Senaro Project from IST 605 demonstrates this PLO perfectly. For this project we were put into the shoes of a Reference Librarian helping a user, the user I came up with was a undergraduate student with a history project questions related to a class they were in. I had to provide various resources from new articles, books, videos, and interviews to name a few to fill my user’s information needs without swaying their research project.

Knowing user information is very important to making changes or not changing something that people love. Without that information some changes can be shots in the dark hoping people will like the new materials or services. Using this information also shows that you know your users and the community that you serve. One project that demonstrates this PLO is the Final Report to Partner Library project in IST 613. This project has me looking at library user information seeing what they already have and what they could have more of to make a recommendation to fill a gap in services in a library. This user information was used to make recommendations, find gaps in services, find gaps in service for specific users, and to try and determine what the users care about the most.

As information professionals’ data is something that we will always be working with, something we would love to have more of and sometimes something we wish we had less of. Being able to work with, interpret, and utilize data, whatever it may be, is important. The best project that demonstrates this PLO the Full Research Proposal from IST 632, as well as my current job as a Sales Researcher/data entry for a waste and recycling company. First the research proposal project was a theoretical proposal for a research project collecting information on the topic of Native American repatriation and how Native Americans not involved in any repatriation process view the topic. The proposed data collection methos was to use surveys followed by one-on-one interviews with people. As for my current job, I collect business data that matches what we look for in an ideal client, some areas have a set number of locations, annual revenue being a certain range, belonging to certain industry types. I take this data, organize it and send it to our sales team who will then contact the businesses. The last part of this PLO “interpret results from studies in library and information science fields” I have been doing this almost the entire program using sources and studies done by other information professionals for uses in all my projects.

Being able to determine what technologies will help and what will only cause confusion or do be over kill is important. Sometimes changing to the newest tech option available asap is not the best move. Knowing what tech to use and when to use it will be important going forward as technology progresses. Two projects show this on two different ends, the first is the AT report and Recommendations Project from IST 546 and the other is the Next Generation Cloud Technologies from IST 615. The AT report saw me looking into assistive technologies in a local library in my area and doing a report back based on what they had, what could be updated, and what was missing and recommended to be added based on library users in the community. For this project I looked at many technologies from the elevators to assistive reading devices, to tablets. For the second project, the Next Generation Cloud Technologies, I had to do research into what I considered some up and coming could web services and do a report on why I think they will be helpful and how they will help over current cloud services.