Conclusion and Affirmation

Conclusion

Reflection

The creation of the e-portfolio has been the most challenging aspect of learning my chosen profession. I have wanted to be a librarian since I was a small child when I thought, what fun it would be to have a slumber party with all the books! The journey from there to here has been long and arduous, but the things I have seen and done have formed me into a person who is flexible, adaptable, and always learning from each new experience. Along the way, I sometimes found myself regretting that I had not taken this class or that one in library school so that I could draw on classwork for evidence. One of the challenges was the sheer amount of work in finding ways to prove my competency in these areas. It was during these times that I realized I have worked in some kind of library setting many times and I had experience upon which to draw. I researched these competencies independently and found articles to review or I would ask my supervisor at the library where I worked to let me plan an educational program or decorate a bulletin board and create a book display or spend an afternoon doing reference and then I could write about that. I interviewed librarians about their experiences in the areas of the competencies for which I had taken no formal classes. What this experience has taught me is that I need to be more confident because I am competent in librarianship, through both my education and experiences.

Strengths

As a child, I felt the injustices of life very keenly and was frequently disciplined for declaring a situation “not fair!” This temperament is rather in keeping with the ethics of librarianship in the area of intellectual freedom; knowledge is for everyone who wants it and everyone who wants it must be allowed to access it. What they do with it is their business – privacy and confidentiality are very important to me, as is service. Despite not having taken a reference class in library school, I have become very adept at performing a rather effective reference interview. I have found that the key is to simply pay attention to the patron who is seeking the information. Time and attention are precious commodities in a busy library setting. Giving someone time and attention is like giving a part of oneself and some days that’s very hard to do, but these two things are, I believe, at the heart of service and service is the library’s and the librarian’s raison d’être.

Professional Growth Plan

I am most interested in preservation and conservation of materials. The information they hold is only one thing that makes them valuable; the materials themselves hold another type of information, a context, if one will, in which to interpret the information within. For example, the Ellesmere Chaucer which is currently curated by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California holds clues to the time in which it was written. What type of ink was used? How were books bound and why? What type of materials were available and does that shed light on how and why the writing went as it did? Chaucer wrote a poem, scolding his scribe for laziness; it is believed that this scribe penned the Ellesmere because in certain parts of the incunabula, the writing becomes larger and more uneven, as if the scribe’s hand grew tired.

I would like to do further research in finding a balance between protecting and preserving rare and fragile materials and providing access to them. I would love to work in an archive, keeping materials in a condition to not only preserve and conserve them, but to help keep them accessible and useful for users to glean what knowledge they can from them for years to come.

Affirmation

All introductory, reflective, and evidentiary work submitted is mine alone (except where indicated as a group or team project), and has been prepared solely by me.

Before making my e-portfolio public I have shown respect for the privacy of others by removing mention in this e-Portfolio of information that could lead to the identity of individuals (team members in group projects, internship supervisors, interviewees, etc.) and institutions

 Melissa M. Townsend-Crow