Since my earliest memories, intellectual curiosity has been one of the prime driving forces in my life.  As a child, this drive embodied itself in a succession of intense interests about scientific topics, starting with dinosaurs in my pre-kindergarten years and progressing through entomology, geology, zoology, and, by junior high, astronomy.  In high school my intellectual interests veered toward the liberal arts, and I developed a deep and lasting passion for music, literature, history, and

philosophy.  I still maintain an interest in all of these topics, though some to a greater degree than others, and in recent years I’ve developed, thanks in large part to the dMLIS program, an interest in the intellectual issues associated with library information science.

Below I describe two Information School projects that I feel were particularly effective in broadening my intellectual horizons.

Library Policies Written in Response to the USA PATRIOT Act

For LIS 550 in the Spring of 2005, Jennifer Ander, Melissa Kinnunen, and I composed two library policies in response to the USA PATRIOT Act.  We wrote one of these policy documents as a public library’s explanation to its patrons of what the USA PATRIOT Act is, what it requires the library to do, how the library handles patrons’ personal information, and steps patrons can take to protect their privacy.  The second policy document targets employees of the same library, again explaining what the USA PATRIOT Act is and what it requires the library to do, and also instructing the employees how to respond if they’re approached by law enforcement officials asking for patrons’ personal information.   Notably, a significant percentage, if not the majority, of this project consists of footnotes.  The footnotes justify and explain our policy decisions based on legal research, the policies of other libraries, and our own group discussions and reasoning.  This assignment was significant to my intellectual growth as a librarian because it provided me the first opportunity I’ve had to investigate a government act or law that impacts libraries and to synthesize my findings in a document that could be applied in a true-life library setting.

A Study on the Efficacy of Booktalking

In LIS 570 during the Winter 2007 quarter, Ellie Bair, David Junius, and I researched and composed a statement of problem and literature review for a study that would seek to determine how effective classroom booktalks are in promoting positive attitudes toward reading in elementary school students.  After this was completed, I then wrote a study proposal for a predictive correlational study on the same topic, entitled “Exposure to Booktalking as a Predictor of Reading Attitudes in Upper Elementary-age Students.”  Since LIS 570 no longer requires implementation of the studies students design, I did not carry out the study, though I did include hypothetical statistics and statistical analysis in the study proposal.  Though I think that implementing the study would have been a beneficial experience, I also think that the ten-week time frame in which we would have been required to design and complete an entire study would have seriously curtailed the scope and ambitiousness of what we attempted.  For instance, I designed “Exposure to Booktalking as a Predictor of Reading Attitudes in Upper Elementary-age Students” to take place over an entire school year.  It would involve a sample size of 500 to 1000.  Having the latitude to design a study of this size and depth, in spite of not being able to implement it, was beneficial for me in that the only other study I’ve designed and implemented was a much smaller action research project that I completed over the course of ten weeks during my Master of Arts in Teaching program.  The action research project did not require me to consider the complex logistics of designing a fairly large study deriving data from multiple sites.  The size of my LIS 570 study, on the other hand, forced me to consider the challenges I would encounter when conducting a formal library information science study within a much larger and more complex scope than I am accustomed to thinking about.