Student Learning Outcome Eight

The final student learning outcome asks for something that is not unique to the library field. Instead, it asks those in the program to reflect on their effectiveness as a coworker, a project partner, a “team player.” In librarianship and the information sciences, as with any field where you are not a solo entity, projects and work arise that demand the ability to interact with peers, to listen well to their ideas, and to cooperate in a way that is beneficial to your projects' team, to your organization, and to the community you serve.

It is easy to think of this as being especially noble in librarianship. The communities that librarians serve are precious – public libraries offer a safe haven to some of our country's most vulnerable individuals, providing them access to resources and information that they may never have had access to. Academic libraries, too, serve as a safe haven; a place where researchers can depend on finding truth, solidarity, and support.

It is with those communities in mind that this Learning Outcome be seen as especially important. None of the Learning Outcomes are in place to see how this program helps us serve ourselves; yet this outcome is specifically tuned to help us see our role with our coworkers, our organizations, and our communities.

I am admittedly someone who has had trouble working with group projects. I have struggled with accepting that people have different work ethics, that not everyone works well on the same schedule, and – especially difficult – other people can have amazing and support-worthy ideas, too. Within this program, I found that these were things I was able to conquer and let go of, to learn how to work with and around in order to present the best work possible.

The two projects I've chosen to present this Student Learning Outcome come from my LIS600 course, Foundations of Library and Information Science, and LIS630, Computer Technology and Information Management.

Within this project I worked with two of my fellow students to produce a proposal to help unify and improve the state school's interlibrary loan problem, one which all three of us had encountered numerous issues with. It was a great challenge to not only communicate effectively with two other scholars, but to also discover each of our strengths, assign tasks based on those strengths, and walk away with a cohesive and well-done proposal.

For this project, we were required to look at an open source integrated library system ¹⁾. I worked with one other student to create a fictional library, built a community of patrons, examine the troubles of budgeting and purchasing, and eventually filing reports. It was a tremendous introduction into ILSs, especially from the perspective of FOSS ²⁾. I chose it to represent this particular Learning Outcome because of the emphasis it put on teamwork from the role-playing of colleagues, rather than researchers.