M. Demonstrate Group Work and Collaboration

Introduction to Core Competency M. Demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for group work, collaborations and professional level presentations.

Library and Information Science is a service-oriented field. LIS professionals provide information services to clients who may be students, members of special occupational groups, or the public. Oral and written communication skills are vital for success in service occupations. Nor do LIS professionals work in a vacuum. Collaboration and group work is a reality in today's workplace including libraries and information centers.

While many classes in my MLIS program involved peer-to-peer group work, some provided the opportunity to participate in collaboration with professionals within and beyond Library and Information Science, and many required oral presentations of final projects.

The power of groups lies in bringing together people of differing skills and abilities, and the success of the group depends on the members' ability to work together. At SLIS I worked on group projects that were total successes and those that were total failures.

I learned to work on group projects that traversed a spectrum of meeting in person often outside of class, meeting in person occasionally inside of class, online meetings with people I may have met in person only once or not have met at all. I worked in groups that communicated solely online with tools provided by our school: Blackboard group and chat modes, conference telephone calls, and email messaging. I learned how to motivate groups by working to carry over to the group my own enthusiasm and momentum. Friends I made on group projects continue to be friends today. In one case, someone I worked with on a group project in 2004 interviewed me two years later for a Publishing in the Profession class and published SLIS Student Interview in the The Call Number, Fall 2006.

I leaned that groups usually formed randomly: It could be place of residence, seating arrangement in class, teacher assignation, or simply by default-those left when all groups had formed become a group. I learned when to abandon a dysfunctional group and strike out alone. In one case, with the agreement of the professor, I pulled out of a group that was headed off in an unacceptable direction and forged ahead with the project solo. I also learned that the success of the group depends on each member's contribution. But when I had the slightest doubt about the ability of the members, I installed myself as leader and insisted on having the final edit of the group's paper.

My evidence of competency in participating in, and assuming leadership of, peer-to-peer group projects is demonstrated in a case study titled: Are Some Students More Equal Than Others? Equity for Distance Learners in Academic Libraries. For this project I undertook the role of editor. Case Study Chat Log shows evidence of my role as group leader and final editor.

The Test Procedures document is one small part of a large database design group project called Subject Headings for a Database: Developing the Controlled Vocabulary. I wrote the Test Procedures to move the project forward at a crucial stage. I was instrumental in keeping this project on track and wrote most of the paper. My group demanded that my name be listed first in the authors in recognition of the work I put in conceptualizing the project and writing the final paper.

Travel Memorabilia Collection: Creating the Database involved collaboration between alpha and beta teams with the beta team testing the alpha team's database design. My full participation in this project consisted of alpha team membership in the design phase of our own database and beta team membership in the testing phase of an alpha team's database design.

Collaboration with professionals both within and without the Library and Information Science field is often required of librarians, particularly instructional librarians in academic institutions. I collaborated with an instructor of Business Information Systems, a course offered in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) Department at De Anza College, a community college in Cupertino. The outcome of this collaboration is the Collaborative Information Literacy Project (CILP): Business Information Systems CIS 03 Term Project. Throughout this project I kept a log of our communications. From this log I wrote a paper that analyses the collaboration process: CILP: An Analysis of the Process, a paper that analyzed the collaborative process.

I can also demonstrate competency in oral presentations of final papers and projects. In 2004, to accompany my oral presentation of my LIBR 200 final project on the Open Access Initiative, I created the Open Access Initiative Webliography.