Introduction
E-portfolio organization, structure, and processThis e-portfolio Website fulfills the culminating experience for the Masters in Library and Information Science from SLIS, San Jose State University. The purpose of the e-portfolio is to prove my competency in the 15 core competencies outlined by the SLIS faculty. For each competency I submit an introductory statement in which I explain my understanding of the competency and discuss the evidence I present to prove competency. This introductory statement explains the e-portfolio organization and the process I followed. The portfolio consists of a homepage that outlines the contents in sections: Introduction, Competencies, and Summary. The Introduction presents the organization of the e-portfolio and my philosophy regarding Library and Information Science (LIS) as a profession. The Competencies section is divided further into 15 subsections, A - O, designating the individual competencies. The link to each competency opens to a new page on which I discuss my understanding of that competency and what evidence I present that fulfills it. The reader must open up each hyperlink to access the evidence. Evidence consists of work I have completed over the duration of my MLIS program and some past academic degrees. The Summary allows me to discuss my experiences at SLIS, my strengths and areas for improvement as a library and information science professional, and my professional growth plan. Documents are uploaded in Microsoft Word format and users must have access to this program to read these documents. Eventually I hope to move my papers into PDF format to alleviate the need to use MS Word to download, as Acrobat reader is free to download to any computer. My process consisted of going through my course folders on my home computer and analyzing how the work I've completed related to specific competencies. I organized a 289 folder with folders inside labeled for each competency within which I loaded the course work that related to that competency. For each competency, I created an introduction page in which I introduced that competency and my statement of how I meet it, with links to my coursework. Right from the start, I decided against using Plone. The need to study tutorials to learn how to use it discouraged me. Also I love designing Web sites and the e-portfolio gave me an excellent excuse to design a Web site that featured my expertise in LIS, which I can use as a professional portfolio in future. Plone did not promise to be a persistent link, whereas this Website will work from any server. I did not see any point in organizing a portfolio around a platform that may not be available to me 6 months from now. Statement of professional philosophyMany students have talked about the gap between theory and practice in their SLIS program, that their courses are too theoretical and not related enough to practice. This was not a problem for me. I am a theoretician; I like theory. I learned long ago in a previous research MA program that theory need not be concerned with practice and does not have to be answerable to practice. Theory is theory. Whether or not practitioners choose to base their practices in theory is their issue; it's not the concern of theoreticians to make sure their theories are grounded in practice. Conversely, good theories—useful theories—are those that get picked up by practitioners and applied to practice. Because practice evolves from theory, not the other way around, an MLIS program that teaches simply practices would be nearly mindless. How this is best illustrated is in the field of archives and manuscripts. Many theories exist in archives revolving around what are archives, what are records, does appraisal play a part in archives, what constitutes provenance, and what does archives as evidence mean? I discuss some of these theories in Competency A. Beyond these theories there are archival practices that roughly consist of placing archival materials within acid free folders for their preservation and creating descriptive documents for users to access them. What if the LIBR 257 Archives and Manuscripts class simply taught the practices? What an injustice this would be to not only SLIS students but also the field of archives and manuscripts. Is this really what my fellow students want? My concept of librarianship requires a deep grounding in library and information theory. If there is no theory, there is no science, and library and information science must be called something else like library practices or library technology, which means, not the machinery of libraries, but the techniques of libraries—the practices. Theory is engaged with definition and concept building, but where do these meet with practices? Theory meets practice when processes emerge that match up concepts and definitions with practical needs, which en mass become the science, rather than the art, of librarianship. Such processes or workflows become the Best Practices of librarianship, the ones that professional associations, like SLA and ALA, outline and define. Education in these Best Practices includes both the theory and practical application—in other words the skills of librarianship. The concepts behind libraries and archives, as well as the physical entities, have existed since the beginning of recorded history. Therefore the practical skills associated with them must have existed along with the concepts. There have always been machines associated with libraries, machines in the sense of processes or systems of organization, as in early catalogs being pre-industrial machines and current catalogs being digital machines. A catalog is simply a process or system (a machine) that connects the item with the concept of the item—the record in the catalog. Like any database, a catalog consists of representations of the actual, which in database terminology are referred to as surrogates, just as words are surrogates for the ideas they represent, and numbers are surrogates for the amounts they represent, making language and the number system different kinds of machines. Best practices in librarianship, therefore, are the organizational practices around which the prevalent library systems and processes are designed. While cataloging is itself an organizational practice, i.e. a way of organizing the materials in the collection, cataloging departments have their own organizational practices, called at this level workflows, that order and make sense of the ongoing day to day operation of catalogers. These workflows learned in the cataloging department are what library students feel they are missing when they learn the theories of cataloging in the classroom. This analogy can be applied to the other librarian skills. Students that learn reference and user services in classes feel they are not getting the skills needed in the workplace because they're focusing on reference sources instead of the daily work of the reference librarian. Yes, they have a point and SLIS tries to bridge this gap by offering internships. While many information organizations do subscribe to ALA and SLA Best Practices, their workflows will be unique to that organization, because workflows by definition are always specific to an organization's application of systems and processes that solve practical problem. As such, they cannot be taught in general or ahead of time. It would be interesting to ask, “What library and information science workflows can I claim competency through my MLIS program and coursework?” Or what practical problems have I learned to solve by applying organizational systems and processes that I learned at SLIS? Having had only internships at libraries that were at longest 135 hours, the leadership skills I learned in the last year by solving practical problems at ALASC relate well to the skills and experiences required in the larger LIS world of information organizations and professional associations. Leadership is an important part of my professional philosophy. Leaders of library and information centers must embrace change. What actions should a leader take to resolve conflicts produced by change in an information environment? When change is happening all around you, fixate on one thing that is constant. This one thing will be different for each person. It has to be an idea, a concept, a goal or an ideal, and not a person, structure, or position because they will always change too. By not losing site of this constant, you can maintain order, stability, and good service through out the organization. The goal or concept held in mind should not be allowed to change until it is reached. If it does become altered, the organization will lose focus and things will slide in unpredictable directions. The goal must be held until it is reached; then a new goal replaces it. Goals would be broken down into smaller milestones that all in the organization should be aware of and aim for. The larger goals need be seen only by management initially, while workers at all levels should be made aware of goals as they are reached. Goals and milestones must be chosen wisely or they will be ineffective and eventually altered, which can bring about disorder, lack of direction, distrust and poor motivation, or worst still your goals get ignored by employees and are never reached. You must get the baking of your entire organization and your customers. Everyone involved must buy in. How to ensure this? Plan campaigns, informational meetings, bulletin/white board displays, posters, banners or any visual reminder of goals aimed for and reached, public celebrations, media reports. The program goal should have a name or slogan that communicates its concept simply and directly. Leaders must build an information environment that sees change as second nature. Change can be defined in terms of innovation, reconfiguration, human resources, financial resources, customer base and customer needs. How to deal with constant change? Keep defining the change: assess, compare, document it, keep statistics, anecdotal records, evaluations from users and providers. Constantly self assess, self evaluate. Examine other similar institutions. Get a feel for the long-range character of the change to figure out where you want to be in five and ten years. And this view too may change. Keep up with changes in the field; maintain professional awareness. Each year focus on a different issue, such as organizational flexibility one year, organizational accountability the next, redefining values, evaluating services, and improving services in following years. My professional philosophy can be summed up in the following points:
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