LIS 5043 Organization of Information

This artifact is for the LIS 5043 Organization of Information class in Spring 2022. The assignment was to create a fictitious non-book collection, create an organization, and organize the items in the collection. I created a museum focused on red dirt music which housed instruments used by red dirt artists.

The project was overall a success. I created a demographic profile of the constituents who live near the museum, provided enough detail about each piece, and listed all the details. I also used my software engineering experience to create a singular index that provides enough information about each piece to differentiate them from others while not being overly complicated. One of the things I also learned was that blank information is not allowed. This rule is contrary to software engineering, where empty fields were preferred due to the ease of queries created instead of relying on others to correctly input placeholders for null values.

In the future, I would approach similar projects in the same way as I did on this one. The only thing I would change in the future would be stating that string sanitization occurs when typing “N/A” into a field. That way, there could be no human errors in entering information. This assignment taught me how to apply my background to the library and information studies field. I learned what it takes to organize and manage collections with metadata and controlled vocabulary, which ties into both the SLIS SLO Core Knowledge (2022) and my personal learning goal of ALA Core Competences Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information (2023). This exercise taught me the principles and philosophy for creating and maintaining a collection. I was able to demonstrate the ability to identify the relevant data and solve the complex issue of having multiple types of items organized in one collection. I also showed my understanding of how search indexing and filtering of the collection will affect various users and the performance of the representations being searched by system users.

Reference

American Library Association. (2023). 2022 ALA core competences of librarianship_final. In American Library Association. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://www.ala.org/educationcareers/sites/ala.org.educationcareers/files/content/2022%20ALA%20Core%20Competences%20of%20Librarianship_FINAL.pdf

School of Library and Information Studies. (2022, October 10). Goals and student learning outcomes. The University of Oklahoma. Retrieved February 27, 2023, from https://www.ou.edu/cas/slis/about/vision