MLIS Discoveries

Makerspaces are an increasingly important feature for libraries of all kinds and I was so excited to delve into the process of designing one with my team. Our Public Library-focused group has two members who currently work in libraries with makerspaces, so we used these spaces as inspiration for designing our space. Like our last project, we were slow to break the ice at our initial meeting to figure out what kind of space we wanted to design, but once someone suggested a space with materials and tools for patrons to create customized materials such as clothes, bags, towels, mugs... everyone in our group was all in and ready to pitch in ideas for tools. And thus, Customization Corner was born! At our initial meeting we settled on our makerspace theme and the tools and items we wanted to include. We set up a shared Google Doc with all of our notes and assigned each person a tool to do further research on. We also set some deadlines and created a group text chat so we could check in if a...

 As I set out to explore different curation sites I was again surprised that I did not use one I was more familiar with: Pinterest. I generally love Pinterest and use a lot in my personal life, but when I was trying to explore the functionality for storing websites I found it very clunky and difficult to use. With that realization in mind I began to explore the other curation sites on the LIS 724 Resource site and settled on three different curation sites that I think will be helpful to me in the future as a librarian... and a student.  The first site I used to curate a collection of 10 websites was Padlet . I was somewhat familiar with this website as we've used it for this class and for another class. I found it very easy to set up and as I pasted my URLs into the Wall format I really liked how the postings were automatically formatted with a photo or logo from the website. I also liked that I could change the color of the background of my collection, I found this very fun t...

 When I first started investigating blog options for this class I was initially torn between Blogger and Medium. I was actually leaning toward Medium as I have a friend through work who publishes editorial content on Medium and he occasionally sends me some stuff. My friend is older and retired so of course I initially thought "If Rodney can do it, so can I!" But after playing around with Blogger and Medium a bit more I decided I might use Medium for more must-see-PLN content and I might use Blogger to hone my blogging and posting skills, especially with this class. I think both are great platforms and I had used Blogger before so I was excited to get a blog going again! With that said, I have been trying for hours to get a photo to upload to this post and am having no luck. I will keep working on this on future posts so you all have some multimedia to enjoy along with my writing. In terms of media literacy, it is imperative that school, academic, and public library staff set...