September 26, 2015

 Class went well today. The day started with a video conference with my academic libraries professor, who's library we are designing a collection development policy for. Last night we signed up for groups and today he explained the target audience for each group and gave us more details about the library and the community.

Next we did a small group activity about ethics that led to good discussion not only in our group but also as a whole class when we came back together, much like last night. Two of the women in my group were teachers and we finished a little early so we were talking about our current jobs and then goals or the future. Both of them had been teaching for over twenty years and both were basically looking for a behind-the-scenes kind of job after they retire from teaching where they don't have to care about people anymore. Which is hilarious but also true. I've only worked at the elementary school for four years but it can be pretty emotionally draining seeing all these kids with bad home lives and the kids who need more help than they're getting or the kids who just can't get something and never will because they keep getting passed on to the next grade. I can't even imagine having over twenty years worth of stories like that.

After lunch we had guest speakers, the local high school librarian, the dean of the university library, and one of the library school's faculty members acting as a public librarian (because she used to be a public librarian). All of them talked about collection development, obviously, because that's what the class is about. It was really interesting.

The last bit of class was taken up with breaking into our big groups for the collection development project for the college. My group seemed to be on the ball so I am cautiously optimistic. We picked an overall team leader and then, because there are three main tasks to accomplish, we divided our main group into three smaller groups and picked leaders for each of those. The smaller groups are for writing the collection development policy, making a selection list of books to buy, and creating lib-guides. I let everyone else say what they wanted to do because I didn't really have a preference, and I ended up in the selection group. For that group we are supposed to cover five subject areas (Writing, History, Sociology, Chemistry, and Biology) so we broke our group up based on that. I'm covering Sociology (because I took a Sociology class once), a History major is covering History, a girl who likes writing is covering Writing, and a guy with a background in hard sciences is covering Chemistry and Biology. We each have $2600 ($5200 for the science guy) and that is apparently a lot of money. The one girl with selection experience said she just spent $1000 for her library and got 130 books. Granted those were fiction books, $2600 could still potentially lead to a pretty long list. It'll be interesting to start looking at. It's a little nerve-racking knowing that this is for a real library and that if we do it right, there is a very real chance that our selection choices will actually be used to fill up the library collection. No pressure.

After class my policy analysis partner and I went down to the computer lab in the basement so we could record our presentation. It ended up being three and a half minutes long, which is short and makes me a little worried, but it took us an hour and a half to finish it. We had to make some changes as we went with the script and I needed to edit some slides, so that took a good chunk of time. I also screwed up several times while trying to record the presentation. It was rough. I had kind of put the original script together based on all the information my partner sent me, but then we ended up cutting most of that out and rearranging things. And I never really paid that much attention to the script because I didn't think I was going to be a part of reading it. But we managed it. Along with submitting the video of the presentation, we also submitted a link to the original, much more in-depth presentation, and a link to the video that plays the song that the sheet music is for. So hopefully if we get any points off for our presentation being so short, we can make up a little bit for it by showing that we did actually have a much more detailed presentation that was just too big. Proof that more than three and a half minutes of content was created. We'll see how it goes.

Due to the delay, the first half of my journey home, once I got back on the highway headed west, was spent facing the sun. It was just to the left of the road and not too far above the horizon. The perfect spot below my visor and impossible not to look at. For quite a while it felt like I was racing it to the horizon. It finally dropped below the horizon and the sunset was pretty cool, so it wasn't all bad. It was also interesting when the sun was more than halfway below the horizon because it kind of looked like a pyramid. The best part of the drive home was not getting trapped behind any slow cars. I came close to catching up to one going into the small town about halfway home but we parted ways and the last half of the journey was completely devoid of cars in front of me. I made it back in record time.

I was going to try and write my reflection tonight for my metadata assignment but after the hour and a half delay and the drive, I was beat. I decided to take the rest of the night off. I'll finish the assignment tomorrow. And come up with my research proposal for my academic libraries class. I can totally do that.