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Up until my entry into the MLS program, my experience with information was to find it and evaluate it. Organizing and managing information was a totally new concept for me. Cataloging and reference gave me a foundation as to how information might be organized and managed in a library, but taking ILS 551, Digital Libraries, opened a new world up to me. As computers change our world, our definition of the library is also changing. And, distance learning is somewhat responsible for this change. Just how can we deliver libraries and information to students at a distance effectively? The World Wide Web offers one solution, but it is a large, unorganized solution. In ILS 551, I learned that one form of a digital library could be an organized collection of links, so I set out to create an organized collection of links to web pages that had to do with writing and writing instruction; I called it the Writer’s Garden. It was amazing to me just how many web sites there are on the subject of writing. Some are connected with college writing centers and others are created by people who write professionally. Collecting the web sites was probably the easy part; organizing them proved much more difficult. Since my audience would most likely be college students enrolled in a college writing course, I decided to organize my collection of links as close to a college writing handbook as I could.
While the Writer’s Garden was accessible through its table of contents, individual links to web sites were harder to locate. In ILS 531, I learned the value of an index and how it can make documents, or even web sites more accessible. I learned about creating thesauri as well as how to select important terms from a text. And, for my final project, I created a Site Index for the Writer’s Garden. This particular project was one of the most difficult projects I set out to complete during my MLIS program. I am a forest, or big picture person and indexing requires a great deal of attention to tiny details, so I had to learn to think in a new way. I am quite proud of the final product.
Last updated to add CSS Stylesheet on March 5, 2005, by Mary L. Cash