Core Competency I
The following statement and submitted evidence show my competency in use of service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate information access, relevance, and accuracy for individuals or groups of users.
In my opinion, providing access to information is one of the most important aspects of librarianship and the information profession. Through out history, library and information professionals developed a number of tools to facilitate users’ access to information and collections. From the Pinakes of Callimachus to the WorldCat, librarians listed, catalogued, indexed, and tagged their collections. Libraries opened branches in the furthest parts of the town, loaded books on buses, and drove... MORE>>
Some of the evidence documents are presented as HTML pages, but most of them are in iPaper format, which requires ADOBE FLASH PLAYER. Clicking on [PDF] link will open the same documents in ADOBE ACROBAT READER.
Evidence 1 :: Tower of Babel: The problem of displaying scripts on the Internet and the Unicode solution
This research e-paper was developed for the Special Studies class, Spring of 2006, and shows my understanding of concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate access for specific users.
Reflecting the United States origin of modern computer development, the first software used ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) keyboard-encoding scheme, all monitors showed only ASCII characters, and all printers printed only ASCII fonts. The software users from the non-English speaking world had serious problems with processing and outputting information in their native languages and scripts. Every country solved the problem in its own way, changing the keyboard mappings to local standards, usually following the local convention for typewriter keyboards. However, with the rise of the Internet, the international community needed to find international solutions. During the 1980s, an idea emerged of a system of mapping characters where every character of the every script on the world would use a unique code – hence the name Unicode – associated only with that character across languages, software programs, or operating platforms. The e-paper is divided in three sections and the first one explains the principles of the computer encoding and traces the history of characters mapping problems. The second section, examines how different scripts and the ways they reflect the structure of the languages they transcribe. The third section, explains principles of character mapping, genesis and basic principles of the Unicode, and its applications in modern computer technology.
Evidence 2 :: Finding Aid for Anne McCaffrey Papers [PDF] and folder description [PDF]
This document was written during my archival internship in the University of California Riverside, Special Collections and Archives, Spring of 2007, and shows my competency in use of service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate information access and relevance for various users.
The main outcome of my archival internship in the Special Collections of UC Riverside libraries was processing the Anne McCaffrey Papers collection and writing the finding aid for it. The collection was composed of manuscripts, galleys, notes and correspondence created throughout most of Anne McCaffrey’s writing career and, with only few exceptions, exclusively related to the writing of her books. The finding aid follows traditional format of archival finding aids and provides basic information about the creator and scope of the collection, stipulates accessibility and copyright information, as well as details about the acquisition of the collection. That is followed with a short biography of Anne McCaffrey and list of additional sources. The scope and content of the collection and definitions of series and sub-series precede the detailed folder list. The thirty-four-page folder list is generated from an Access database.
Evidence 3 :: Internship Final Report, Outcome II: Preparing the electronic records for public access on the Internet catalog
This report was written as the conclusion of my archival internship in the Autry National Center, Electronic Cataloging Initiative, Fall of 2007, and shows my competency in use of service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate access, relevance and accuracy for individuals and groups of users.
The main goal of my internship in the Southwest Museum of the Autry National Center was to acquire practical knowledge of the technical and conceptual issues related to a comprehensive digitalization project in a museum environment. The internship had two outcomes: (1) inventory and imaging of artifacts selected for digitalization and (2) preparing the electronic records for public access on the Internet catalog. The text presented on the web page is the excerpt for the final report and details the tasks and learning experiences gained while accomplishing the second outcome of the internship. The specific tasks, detailed in the text involved data clean-up and re-cataloging of existing record entries; cataloging images using subject headings; background research and writing of scope notes about Caroline Boeing Poole and Col. John Hudson Poole, donors of a sizable collection of Native American baskets; and assisting in uploading completed records to the Internet catalog.
This web site was developed to satisfy the graduation requirements for
the School for Library and Information Science at San Jose State University California
Text, design, and digital imaging by Vlasta Radan