LIBR 509 Course Reflection – J.J. Watson-MacKay

Submissions

learnings

Revisiting Goal Setting Activity

Below are my original responses (Jan. 18, 2024) to the Goal Setting Activity prompts, along with new reflections I've just written, over 3 months later (April 27, 2024).

Dream workplaces: When I picture myself working as an information professional, it's at an institution like

- Vancouver Black Library,
- PeerNetBC,

- or Bakau Consulting.

I’ve volunteered at Vancouver Black Library for the past 6 months, and would love to continue serve that community throughout my career as an information professional.

I'll also include a graphic below of my general wishlist for places I'd like to work and learn

Looking back at this list and ideal working condition criteria, I now feel better equipped to contribute to excel in the work being done by the teams of people these organizations represent with what I've learned this term.
I also feel extremely fortunate to have experienced many of stellar work and learning environments and pillars of support elements my time in the iSchool Students of the Global Majority and Disabled Graduate Student Association this term. It's nice to know I don't have to hang all my hopes on a dream workplace to find communities where I can fruitfully work and learn as an information professional. With the Creating a Knowledge and Project Management System for iSGM, I've already taken steps to integrate task and project management systems, as well as staff wiki-like documentation, introducing pillars of support into the stellar work and learning environments I've found in the iSGM and DSGA.

Organization gripes: If you catch me annoyed about how badly something is organized or hard to find, it's probably

- requires wandering around a labyrinthine website with broken links and walls of text I can’t collapse,

- Yifan's (LIBR 507 TA and iSchool PHD student) discussion of her research around user engagement variables with hyperlinks, text blocks and toggle lists at the iSchool Research Day provided helpful better practices for website content layout I'm eager to apply.

- gatekeeps key features in the desktop version when forcing me to use the messy mobile version

- - I'm disappointed that Zotero's Android app is still in beta - the mobile browser experience of Zotero is clunky and added heaps of frustrating friction to my citation and readings management. While Zotero desktop works well on my PC, missing out on so many features on my phone was a pain. I'm definitely going to reconfigure my digital scholar workflow this summer and explore more elegant mobile alternatives.

- fails to make clear what questions/fields/formats/identification I’ll need to fill out to access/submit something

- Despite knowing it was simply a demonstration survey only a few people would test, I spent heaps of time tediously refining our group's LIBR 507 Study Protocol survey in Qualtrics. Hours and hours of assembling controlled vocabulary-based picklists, applying question display logic, and arranging facet/isolet groupings of field responses. That's how much I care about form design. I'm glad it gave me a chance to get familiar with Qualtrics - I'm sure that will come in handy for future research assignments and UBC initiatives I contribute to.

Special interests: If I were asked to give a 20 minute lecture on any topic, I'd probably end up talking about

- zine-making as a medium and community practice for creating every-day strategy guides for mortals. Strategy guides are the curated reminders, entry-points and boons we can turn to when we need them. They are steeped collective wisdom, rooted in ancestral survival guides known as the Greenbook and decorated in the nerdy whimsy of video game strategy guides.

I am far more capable of giving an informed lecture about zines as strategy guides now - I've even started up a Zines + Library & Archival Information Studies Zotero Group library with some of my favourite zine research gems I've come across throughout this term.

What do you want to have achieved by the time of your portfolio submission in April?

- constructive guidance and focused time to create and share a strategy guide zine aimed at supporting my classmates/peers navigation of their first year of the MLIS program

- While not a zine, my Creating a Knowledge and Project Management System for iSGM gave me the opportunity to create a community-supporting systems integration, including classification categories (areas), controlled vocabulary to relate resources, and content schema to standardize contributions to the iSchool Students of the Global Majority's collective knowledge repository. That assembly of scaffolding, documentation, and collaboration tools provide a great entry point to building strategy guides together, as a joint effort with other iSchool students, rather than as a solo undertaking I was imagining in January. LIBR 508 did give me an opportunity to create zine for the seminar facilitation project - I liked it so much, I even went back to revise it recently. Here's my zine in case you're curious:

LIBR508 Seminar Brochure by Joseph Watson-MacKay

- a handful of diagrams, info-graphics and short-form written criteria to consult for decision making support, based on what I learn in this course

I have plenty of notes, readings, and resources from this term I can now revisit and organize, depending on my capacity this summer. I'm glad I didn't spend extra time this term trying to create synthesized materials around resource description and knowledge organization on top of the assignments themselves. I am better off revisiting related course materials slowly, keeping in mind some community initiatives I could apply them to, before deciding what to do next.

What skills can you develop in this course to take forward into the rest of your program and your career?

- critical discernment skills around organizational tools, frameworks/models and techniques, to be able to evaluate, integrate and maintain (and reconfigure, as needed) the generative resources and systems within a team/organization/community

I've got some specific ideas and initiatives to continue pursuing these skills in the How I'll continue practicing skills section later on in this post.

- project management skills, particularly in applying knowledge organization and resource descriptions to effectively scope projects that adapt to and account for varying capacity and sustainable pacing for those contributing to the project

Estimating and budgeting time has always been a significant stumbling block for me in university, particularly when the assignment requires choosing the topic and scope based on my interests. Almost all of my LIBR 509 submissions took me at least double the suggested length of time (3 hours), and I experienced a lot of anxious tension and guilt around keeping up with the weekly pacing of assignments.
It's a double-edged sword, having the freedom to choose my own topics for assignments. While it's intrinsically motivating to learn about things I'm curious about, it's also elusively tricky to scope deeply interesting initiatives effectively. Most new and first attempts at something are going to involve more effort, time and confusion. It feels harder for me to assess the scope of something individually.
Body doubling with other iSchool friends has certainly helped on a number of occasions I might have gotten lost down a rabbit hole, but syncing up, especially off campus, hasn't been easy to do. Luckily folks in my cohort often take to the iSchool Discord to talk about their assignment successes and challenges - I hope to continue learning (and scoping) in tandem more throughout the program.

Controlled Vocabularies for Portfolio Skill Tags

Following Vanessa and Jordanne's respective suggestions in Discord, I added two sets LIS skill tags to my eportfolio, drawing on controlled vocabularies:

25-4022.00 - Librarians and Media Collections Specialists - O*NET OnLine Occupational Information
LIBR 509 Course Topics

Tagging each of my submissions with these skills was a helpful way to reflect and reinforce how to describe the labour and expertise the activities challenged me to practice. Being able to refer back to shared language, using LIS terminology, has highlighted concrete ways I have and might continue to gain experience with those skills.

How I'll continue practicing skills

Linked Data & Cataloging Instruction

I stumbled across a self-paced online learning program, 23 Linked Data Things | Minitex, about linked data that I'm so intrigued to try out. The WikiData editing activity we did with Bri in class, along with the systems integration assignments, left me even more curious about the potentials for linked data. I'm glad to have found such an invaluable cataloguing entry-point, especially with plenty of hands-on experiences built into it.

Community Cataloging Experimentation

The Cataloging Lab

To complement the practical cataloguing instruction of 23 Linked Data Things, I'd also like to spend some time exploring, experimenting with and perhaps even contributing to collaborative projects like The Cataloging Lab. I'm fascinated by critical cataloguing and want to follow that enthusiasm to engage with more radical LIS professionals, communities and ethics of care.

Zine Cataloguing at Vancouver Black Library

The Vancouver Black Library has a collection of zines on a few shelves on the wall. I have rarely seen patrons looking at the zines, and I've heard some hesitations from other volunteers around how to go about organizing, cataloguing and curating the items. Rearranging VBL's zines into a shelving order for display and discovery remains an intimidating endeavor to tackle.

Having done my Standardizing Zine Metadata – xZINECOREx assignment, the prospect of cataloging the VBL collection is one I'm looking forward to. This summer, I would like to take time to explore local zine libraries, return to ethical and practical zine cataloging research I saved for later, and spend time getting a sense of the subject matter of VBL's zine collection.

Accessible Metadata in iSGM and DSGA Notion Knowledge management systems

Lastly, building on the Creating a Knowledge and Project Management System for iSGM initiative, I would like to explore ways to apply the accessible metadata practices, examples and resources shared by the Metadata for Accessible Digital Resources Poster Session at the 2024 BC Library Association Conference to that workspace:

Accessibility in digital resources is an area I presently know little about, beyond basic awareness of things like alt text, text to speech, and other general elements. In addition to creating the iSchool Students of the Global Majority (iSGM) Knowledge and Project Management System, I am also collaborating with other UBC students in the Disability Graduate Student Association (DSGA) on building the DSGA student organization Notion Workspace.

With the foundation of metadata knowledge LIBR 509 has equipped me with, I'm feel primed to learn and experiment with implementing accessible metadata in a community of folks collectively advocating for accessibility at UBC.