A community of readers, a picture from one of the first authors I saw in person.
Technology changes fast. Libraries serve at the front lines in keeping people up to date. This can include providing access to computers and mobile devices or providing information on their usage.
Technology is not just hardware, it is also software. Both in undergraduate and graduate school I have continued to work with web technologies. I designed and implemented the St Cloud NAACP’s first website now only available in an archived version. For that project I learned to use a content management system. It was one of the first times I had to learn an entire system on my own in order to provide better service.
Beyond the technology I learned how to work in a committee where it was important to develop consensus. The people on the board had different views on what they wanted, vastly different views on what technology could and should do and little idea of the work involved in such a project. Honestly, neither did I. This experience was one of the first times I was able to teach information literacy, even if I had no idea what to call it . It was highly rewarding.
I even created a website from scratch for a class. At the time I had little idea of the workload required in learning html and css, but I undertook to create the vision of the website I had. From the technological side I thought it turned out well. I would later learn there were more efficient ways to do what I did. On the content side, I would later learn that book reviews can be much shorter. More than anything, these projects taught me there is always more to learn. Each project builds on the lessons of the previous.
At the iSchool I took classes in databases and XML. With the foundations learned in these projects I believe I can quickly learn most new software and implement a solution. I also learned there is a time to ask for help. Without the community board for XML I could not have finished the final project. A simple mistake had cascaded into a fatal one. There simply comes a time when you have to know you cannot move forward without help.
Technology will always be a central theme at libraries. As a professional librarian I fully expect to keep up with the latest technology, to handle technology problems for patrons and for the library. My class and personal experience have trained me well for this task.