The mid-point report

Weeks, which seem like mere days, have flown by and I find I have to catch up again. So much has happened. This is the semester where it’s all come together: the knowledge and theories learned in class and putting them all into practice. I like this new stage of my education, finding my own sources of knowledge and development, in line with my current responsibilities and interests. And I’m guided by the good teachers I’ve had - in and out of the classroon - who’ve armed me with the information skills and mentality that are helping me to find my own way.

On the Collection Development front, I’ve been kept busy and thriving with informative meetings, work on my Globalization in Latin America bibliography and an instructional session for Afro-Latin America, an Honors College course.

Meetings
Michael Lonergan, from Gifts and Exchanges, talked about - well - gifts and exchanges. I walked away, with his blessing, with tools for organizing information about gifts that I took over to the New York State Library, where I do serials gifts searching myself. I showed Michael’s ‘bookmarks’ - handy for pointing out which items are not owned, already owned, owned in multiple copies, owned but in worse condition, etc. - to my supervisor and am now designing similar ones for our needs.

Stefania Curiale, from Acquisitions, went over foreign approval plans and outlined the entire process from the receipt of materials to the generation of purchase orders. Elaine Moody, also from Acquisitions, explained how orders are created. Susan Whiteman talked about monographic ordering with much valuable information on e-books. Last but certainly not least, Jean Guyon covered the acquisition of serials and electronic resources. This included the criteria for selection – network compatibility, interface evaluation, access options – licensing and, again, a little about e-book collections.

Globalization and Latin America Guide and Bibliography

I just added up the time for the mid-term internship report (basically this blog), and I’ve already reached the requisite 75 hours. That’s mostly due to the Globalization bibliography. I spent quite some time searching our catalog for the sources to be included, possibly too much time, and figuring out the search strategies for getting a good cross-section of resources. I quickly discovered, as Jesus had warned me, that this topic – which I’ve become absorbed by - is a kind of octopus which reaches across to numerous other disciplines. I’m especially fascinated by globalization’s implications for the homogenizing of the Spanish-language (in Puerto Rico we called this neutral, culture-unidentifiable tongue ‘espanol Univisión’.)

I’ve spent the past few weeks searching for the +100 materials I found on the catalog. That was a chore in itself as a large percentage were out on loan (a good thing, though!.) At this point, I’ve used up all my recall privileges for the rest of the term. I’d say I’ve reviewed and written annotations for little more than half of them. I’ve also written out the scope, some search strategies, subject headings and browsing sections. This week I’ll start formatting on Dreamweaver – I’m eager to see it online!

Instructional Session

Our last two internship sessions focused on an Instructional session for the Afro-Latin America course. Jesús reviewed the instructional resources he uses, fron online literacy aids - check out the cool Boolean Machine! which visually illustrates the concept - to evaluation forms given out to students at the end of the session. My part in this session was to introduce students to the HAPI database, how to access it, how to search on it and how to access the retrieved materials. All was within the framework of a term paper students will be working on for the end of the term. That day we rehearsed, made a few tweaks to our parts and then delivered the actual session. It went quite smoothly and felt satisfying, fun and exhilarating. Aftwerwards we went over the students’ comments – mostly encouraging - and thought of ways to follow-up and improve on future sessions.

Jesus’ Info Sessions

Pant, pant, pant… besides all of that, Jesús has continued the sessions on vendors and publishers of Hispanic and Latin American resources ‘round the world. We’ve covered Spain, US publishers of materials about LA (Latin America, not Los Angeles) and US distributors of materials published in LA.