Assignment #1

Overall, I truly believe that everything we do as TLs revolves around student learning and this course has highlighted that the organization of the space, schedule and resources should be examined periodically in this regard. In my library, physical access is a main issue as I am only there two days a week. I can see even more clearly now that the organization of the space, resources and systems are very important and that a well organized, current website could be vital to my colleagues and the students of my school, especially in this situation where they do not have enough access to the TL.

The thing that I particularly enjoyed being challenged to think about in this course was the concept of access in terms greater than just physical access. I specifically enjoyed the notion of folksonomy or tagging as is done in online environments versus the traditional subject headings. I enjoyed the readings, “The Ghost in the Catalogue” and the one on folksonomy and tend to lean towards agreeing with them, however, a post that Brenda made on March 31^st made me pause yet again. In her post she mentioned something her district librarian had posed to her about how the researching student could be overwhelmed by results when searching dinosaurs if every picture book that has a picture of a dinosaur is catalogued so that it comes up when the word dinosaur is searched. Too many results obscure the valuable in a sea of mediocraty and worse, much like the number of hits in a Google search and we certainly don’t need that to happen in our OPACs. Even now, there are some searches where I wish I could narrow my search results in Destiny like I can when using the EBSCO databases for example.

The Module 2 lessons on cataloguing were great overall, a good reminder of the importance of MARC though most of the concepts, in general, were not new to me. At least I learned more about other fields, especially from the LOC website, and can now better spot inconsistencies in our district's union catalogue (learned that term here and ODLIS) and can have even more intelligent conversations with our district cataloguers. Adding to the intelligence of the conversations I can hold with our district cataloguers, though the school-based TLs do not need to concern ourselves with this generally, Lesson 10 brought out another topic that I’d never thought about before, where the MARC records in our OPAC come from. It was interesting to find out about the services of Follett, ULS, Amicus and the LOC as sources of MARC records and to be able to see in the MARC record itself where it has come from.

As for the major assignments, I did quite enjoy assignment #3 mostly because it gave me the opportunity to experiment with a variety of technology I had never used before and can now share with my colleagues and students. I did end up focusing mostly on physical access, but it was a good exercise in considering the variety of areas that could have been improved. Assignment #2, however, I did not enjoy. I would have preferred to have had smaller weekly assignments on this topic where I could have received feedback more frequently rather than floundering around in a monster-sized assignment hoping I had it right. I did not require that kind of stress in order to have been engaged in thought about the topic.

Considering my participation in the discussion forums I would rate my participation in this course as good, perhaps even excellent but I really hate selling myself and am my own worst critic. I may not have posted a lot of responses in the “discussion” forum but there are two main reasons for this. One, the Vista forums are a place I do not like to be as I find them to be extremely frustrating to navigate. Two, I also find that they are often used as a repository for each person’s individual thoughts, not discussion. I do read the posts, many that repeat the same points over again, and I refuse to post meaningless responses to each post. Unless I am truly challenged by the content I will not post. I also found that I tend towards actually talking to my colleagues that I work with rather than posting when batting around a concept as the discussion is what drives my learning.