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competency A

competency B

competency C

competency D

competency E

competency F

competency G

competency H

competency I

competency J

competency K

competency L

competency M

competency N

Statement of Competency M

In which I discuss my competency in oral and written communication skills necessary for group work, collaborations and professional level presentations.

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Although the School is very much oriented towards the on-line, virtual and technologically advanced learning environment, there is still a lot of old-fashioned classroom time. All students taking Reference and Information Services course are required to give an in-class presentation of their instructional guide. During my first semester, in our section of the Information and Society class, the students took part in the Ethic Court. The class was divided into groups, and each group received a scenario of some possible ethical issue in a library environment. Each group had a lawyer for the accused and a lawyer for the plaintiff party. In addition to that, some of the students were given the duties of judge or bailiff. The jury which decided the cases was selected by the instructor and consisted of three librarians.

The members of the group were required to collaborate on the strategy, create all necessary documents, and find willing students to bear witness for their case and then defend the case in open court. All communications, brainstorming, preparation of the documents, and finding the witnesses, was accomplished using the BlackBoard site and individual e-mails.

The scenario received by our group involved a public library branch which was originally founded and partially financed by a religious endowment.  A gay couple alleged sexual discrimination by the branch’s collection policy. My group saw each other for the first time on the first day of two day class meeting, which was also a day before the trial. My EVIDENCE 2 to this competency is the closing statement that I gave at the trial as a lawyer representing the library. My argument was that the court should dismiss the case because the library did nothing wrong. It followed all library procedures prescribed for this kind of situation, and the collection policies, currently in place, reflected the reading habits of the local community. Unfortunately, court did not agree with me. Nevertheless, the trial proceedings were an interesting exercise in imagination and in the understanding of library ethics. But, most of all, they were a valuable experience in collaborative thinking, writing and presentation.

The course in Information Retrieval also required group and collaborative work on database development and the writing of the report paper, which is EVIDENCE 2 to competency E. For the seminar in the Medieval Manuscripts and Incunabula we were required to write four research papers. EVIDENCE 4 to this competency is one of two papers about the European medieval manuscript tradition. It describes the Codex 650, part of the Sitticum Collection of manuscripts created during 12th century in the Cistercian Abbey in Sticna, Slovenia. The research paper describes the manuscript and its provenance, and analyses the text, writing, and scribal techniques as well as the history of the Cistercian order and their attitude toward reading. The second paper, which is also EVIDENCE 1 for competency C, examines the codex Clm 337 from the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. The codex contains the full five books of Latin version of De materia medica written by Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus (40-90 CE) and is created in the 8th or 9th century in Italy. The research paper examines the physical characteristics and illustration of the manuscript using secondary sources; discusses the character of the script and the origin of the text. Besides the description of the volume, the paper examines the use of herbals in Medieval Europe and how they are changed in the process of transmission. Although I used a number of the university library resources, I obtained the particular cataloging information directly from the repositories using their on-line reference services.

The experience in communication and collaboration in a virtual environment was one of the most valuable assets of my studies. In Fall semester of 2006, the student organization LISSTEN (Library and Information Science Students to Encourage Networking) invited students to apply for various functions, and I jumped at the opportunity and applied for the position of webmaster. I wanted to apply my recently acquired web-development skills to something real and purposeful. My EVIDENCE 1 to this competency is the LISSTEN web site, which I completely redesigned during my time as web master. The development and maintaince of the site required extensive coordination and collaboration with various members of the LISSTEN, the School staff as well as faculty.

However, besides building the site, a lot of work in the LISSTEN was about collaboration and finding practical solutions to common needs. Because of my competency in graphic design, I offered to create the promotional bookmark to be distributed at events. In Spring of 2008, I put together slides for a three minute presentation of LISSTEN for the orientation for new students, my EVIDENCE 3 for this competency. As the orientation meetings were held at different times in San Jose and Fullerton, the student organizations prepared slides and sent them to the School faculty, who uploaded the files on the university web site. At each orientation, local student representatives then used the slides to introduce their organization.

Originally, LISSTEN was established as the student organization of students living in the Southern California. The school rents facilities on the campus of the California State University in Fullerton, and LISSTEN had it’s headquarter there. All Board meetings were in the Schools facilities or somewhere conveniently off the campus. However, with the Spring of 2007, LISSTEN established the office in San Jose and expanded its membership to students, staff and faculty of both campuses. The Board functions were expanded to include the vice presidents for the San Jose and Fullerton campuses. In order to facilitate joint Board meetings, LISSTEN started using Elluminate. Elluminate is a Java powered, real-time virtual classroom environment designed for distance education and collaboration in academic institutions. As we were all required to be familiar with this tool for our coursework, LISSTEN board meetings were just another opportunity to hone our skills in on-line communications.  As it could be seen from the Board minutes, all meeting after August 2007 are convened using Elluminate. As the School is intensively developing its site on Second Life, I expect that very soon, LISSTEN will hold meetings on the School’s virtual campus there.