Competency O and Reflection
While working on my e-portfolio as the summation project for my time at San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science I have learned much about librarianship but also myself. I have always been obsessed with learning new things and school has always been an area that I shine. During my undergraduate work at California State University Fresno I took a course on multiculturalism and read the book The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois. The book produced nearly a century ago was more relevant than I had ever expected and what spoke to me that I now understand is Dubois emphasis on attaining a classical education. During his time he was a strict advocate for education through the four year theoretical model and fought against Booker T. Washington’s advancement of vocational schools that sought only to teach practical skills. I was never sure which was the superior model or whether they both could coexist as choices for differently motivated students solely depending on the subject at hand. Librarianship could go down either path following a holistic conceptual model focusing on the inter-disciplinary nature of the institution or be simply a routine education of the principles of cataloging, reference interviews, and management practices. I understand now that if as a society we value information research as a process we must put value into the training that librarians receive. Technology and the environments of librarians are changing fast and an education that entails only the basics of doing the job comes up significantly short.
The education at SLIS has more than prepared me for a career as an information professional. Librarianship is not just about the rote aspects that library technicians continue to push into. Being an information professional entails understanding a complex web of information that is the foundation of information retrieval, service, and commitment to professional ideals and development. The e-portfolio lays down a rubric for the information professional to detail how they have achieved the educational standards of SLIS. By successfully detailing and providing evidence for the myriad of learning outcomes we can illustrate to the school that we have earned our degrees. More importantly it illustrates to myself that I have become an information professional.
It astounds me the amount and level of work that I have completed while attending SJSU SLIS and working full-time for a significant portion of that experience. While my writings on the competencies speak for themselves there are so many other areas that I have learned about, explored, and interacted with that to describe it all would require writing a novella. In today’s world we all must act as information professionals in our lives. Navigating wide swaths of information that has significant implications on our lives. Not everyone can be their own information professional due to limits of education, time, and inequality and as librarians we serve our communities to share our knowledge to enrich theirs.
From the stereotypes one would never know how much emphasis is placed on collaboration with coworkers and colleagues. During my time at SJSU SLIS nearly each course has had a collaborative element to it. The coursework reflects what working in the modern workplace consists of being a team player, working with colleagues of varying skills and abilities, and developing a project based on a deadline. SLIS has pushed myself farther than I ever expected and illustrated that I have what it takes to be an information professional. Developing a business plan, creating a marketing initiative and advising a non-profit organization how it can improve its marketing mix, paper prototyping then crafting web applications based on information principles and adhering to accessibility standards, conducting reference interviews, collaborating via a host of different mediums, conducting research and publishing a paper in an open access repository. Without the influential instructors there to assist me and the gracious and ingenious classmates I have a set of accomplishments in such a short amount of time that it makes my head spin.
When I first started the program one of the classes I took was titled Information and Society. One of the initial questions that the instructor posed was that if librarians had been replaced by a search engine and whether they were on the path to extinction. I started the program for the reason to become a librarian and it behooved me to wonder whether I was joining a rapidly declining profession. The class continued on and we explored more and more about what makes an information economy in our society and I reflected once again on that initial question. At that point I knew that I was going to complete the program no matter what because I knew that librarians were not going to go extinct. While the role of the librarian may change based on budgetary constraints and considerations the work that librarians do is vital and is morphing into the profession of the information professional. Librarianship is diverse there is no one right path to take that sets one as a librarian or not a librarian. While the work may vary and may appear different from what the casual observer expects the fundamentals are there. In many of the courses my instructors emphasized on being open to new opportunities and not to be set in defining oneself as a set type of librarian. Librarians inhabit professional roles along a wide spectrum of activities and not all are considered practicing librarians. That inter-disciplinary ability and knowledge is what drew me to SJSU SLIS and why I have decided to complete the program. These skills are more than just rote tasks they are essential abilities that any organization would benefit from.
Education is a net good in a person’s life. It is never a guarantee to a particular type of life or living condition. However, participating in education such as information science is like Dubois concept of the veil. As librarians we inhabit both sides of the veil and only those that have been along our path can see the veil as well. The veil separates us from others that do not share the same ethical background and understanding of information and its impacts on society. It can be a struggle to know that we see and evaluate the many benefits of increased informational access and continue to face justifying our positions to the public or politicians looking to make funding cuts. We must fight on and continue to be everything that our profession entails so when asked what we do we can answer that, “We serve.”