PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE

"An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching." - Mahatma Gandhi

I've had a wealth of wonderful practical opportunities during my time at the iSchool to practice what I have learned in the classroom, and further my education, knowledge, and experience. For purposes of this portfolio, I will highlight three of my practical experiences below to illustrate what I have learned outside of the classroom.

Researcher and Research Analyst for the U.S. Impact Study on Public Access Computing in Public Libraries (September 2008 through October 2009)

I began my work on the U.S. Impact Study of Public Access Computing in public libraries as a student volunteer even before I started the MLIS program. Over the course of a little over a year, my experience grew from a volunteer to independent study credits to fieldwork researcher to a research analyst. Through this experience, I learned so much about the U.S. public library system, library administration, library patrons, and policy and decisions made about public libraries in the U.S. In addition, I gained invaluable experience conducting research, designing research instruments, participating in fieldwork case study research in the Enoch Pratt Public Library System in Baltimore, Maryland, and coding and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative research data from the four case study sites of the research project. Working with the lead principal investigators, Mike Crandall and Karen Fisher, as well as the research coordinators, Samantha Becker and Carol Landry, I was able to gain experience and working knowledge of all that goes into such a large research project. Through my experience on this research project, I became very passionate about public access to computing projects, both in libraries and other venues, in the United States and abroad in developing countries.

By looking at public access computing use across eight key domains (health, education, employment, eBusiness, eCommerce, social inclusion, civic engagement, and eGovernment), we were able to identify how people are using computers and the Internet in public libraries, as well as the impacts and outcomes this use has in their individual lives, as well as their communities at large.

My experience on the U.S. Impact Study included:

• Background research on the four case study sites (Baltimore, Maryland; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Oakland, California
• Serving as case study site trip manager for Baltimore (coordinating travel schedules; setting up appointments with library staff, administrators, community leaders, and policy makers; documenting and cataloging interview transcripts, notes, artifacts, photos, and more)
• Interviewing library users, staff, community members, and administrators according to a structured interview schedule
• Leading intercoder reliability training and coding interview transcripts from all case study sites in Atlas.ti, according to hundreds of domain-specific codes 
• Analyzing the results from the coding to find themes, identify outliers, and draw general conclusions from case study data. Some of the analysis can be viewed here from a presentation I gave to the team at the conclusion of my research analyst position
  

Patrons waiting for library to open in Baltimore

Coordinator for the Center for Information and Society (CIS) (December 2008 through June 2009)

Through initial volunteer work with the Center for Information and Society (CIS), I was offered the extraordinary opportunity to serve as the Coordinator for CIS, working for my adviser, Karine Barzilai-Nahon, the director of CIS at the time. During my time as the Coordinator, CIS was making structural, procedural, and strategic changes, and I had the opportunity to be involved in many of the discussions involved in making these changes with CIS staff and iSchool faculty. I learned a great deal about the processes behind making strategic changes of a research organization, which I'm sure will prove invaluable as I continue to professional endeavors.

In addition to being a part of the numerous discussions and meetings that took place among CIS staff, iSchool faculty, and key advisers, I also performed other duties, such as:

• Serving as primary support person to the Director
• Planning meetings, events, and conferences
• Drafting letters, documents, and memos
• Documenting and implementing procedures for the Center
• Responding to inquiries regarding the Center on behalf of the Director
• Creating and maintaining a database of the Center’s existing network of researchers, guest speakers, and affiliated faculty and professionals
• Representing the Center at internal university events and external events on behalf of the Director
• Supporting research program development by identifying new venues for research studies
• Researching grants and funding; composing grant applications and letters of inquiry
  

Graduate Research Assistant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Libraries Program (August 2009 through August 2010)

Being selected as the graduate research assistant for the Global Libraries team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was a dream come true for me. I attribute a lot of the reason I was selected to my experience on the U.S. Impact Study described above. Working in a relatively small team (13 people) in a relatively large foundation has provided many opportunities to learn, engage, and grow as a professional. I'm able to participate in weekly staff meetings that are extremely effective and efficient, and I am encouraged to share my ideas, opinions, and concerns with the team.

While I will be at the foundation through August 2010, I have already learned so much and worked on numerous projects for Global Libraries. While most of the information and research I do at the foundation is confidential that I'm not able to share, I'd like to describe some of my work on the Global Libraries team here:

• Research and analyze needs and readiness criteria of potential countries and grantees we are exploring for grantmaking
• Identify critical information and questions to be addressed during country visits that cannot be sufficiently answered on desk research alone
• Create and maintain an internal report tool for the team to aggregate all of our grantees' impact metrics reporting
• Analyze impact measurement data and drafting reports for numerous audiences, including director-level
• Utilize internal complex databases to create reports of grantmaking activities of the foundation in various geographic regions, such as Africa and Latin America
• Conduct monthly "Brown Bags," where I have shared my U.S. Impact Study analysis with the Global Libraries team and taught them how to use Twitter efficiently and effectively
• Compose trip, meeting, and conference briefings for program officers and directors
• Research and prepare weekly briefings for the team on current events in public libraries, international librarianship, information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), and other pertinent current affairs in the countries we have grants and countries we are exploring

My experience at the Gates Foundation has been extremely valuable in so many ways. I have learned so much about grantmaking, how foundations work, managing grantees, identifying strengths and weaknesses of potential grantees, providing insight and analysis in a concise, coherent way for decision makers both verbally and written, and being proactive about projects I would like to work more on.

Search Intern at Getty Images (January 2010 through March 2010)

I had the opportunity to participate in a 3-credit directed fieldwork at Getty Images during Winter quarter 2010. As a search intern for their search vocabulary team, I learned a multitude of things about search in an eCommerce setting, particularly image and video footage search. Using their internal proprietary software and databases, I learned about how images and footage were indexed, keyworded, and ultimately retrieved by the consumers of the website.

I participated in three main activities while at Getty: writing Boolean queries to disambiguate preferred terms, creating and editing preferred terms and keywords in their large controlled vocabulary, and writing Boolean rules to adjust keyword weighting, enabling the most relevant and iconic images to float to the top of the search results.

At the end of the three months, I presented the work I did on the keyword weighting project to the entire search team. Due to the proprietary nature of the content, I am unable to show my presentation here.

More about my experience at Getty Images can be found on my DFW website here.