Statement of Competency M
Demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for group work, collaborations and professional level presentations.
Many library professionals will be faced with giving a presentation in one form or another. While the ability to present a well written document is a necessary skill, oral presentations are also commonplace in a professional environment. Often, these presentations call for employees to work together in a collaborative situation with co-workers or other libraries or archives. Collaborative skills are especially important in archival situations where institutions benefit from symbiotic relationships. These alliances can prevent duplicate collections and resource sharing in a time of strict budgets. Without the ability to function within a group, a presentation may suffer and discord will rise within the members. These circumstances call for good interpersonal skills and a willingness to compromise and take constructive criticism.
Prior to entering the SJSU SLIS program, I took a public speaking class at Orange Coast Community College. This enabled me to hone my oral communication skills and deliver effective presentations. This skill came in handy when I had needed to give class presentations throughout my courses at SJSU. I was able to overcome my fear of public speaking and use skills such as eye contact and body language to engage and audience. I was also taught effective use of visual aids. LIBR 204 (Information Organizations and Management) taught skills necessary for group work. Reading assignments such as Mary-Lane Kamberg’s articles “The Dynamics of Team Interaction” taught me what pitfalls I might fall into working in a group environment.
I was able to synthesis my skills and knowledge through the following evidential examples of group work and presentations. The first example is a LIBR 200 (Information and Society) project entitled, Group Project – Information Competencyand the accompanying Group Project – Information Competency: Transcript. This project called for a group of four students to present a PowerPoint presentation to the LIBR 200 class using the Elluminate software. Each group member brainstormed on special populations that a public library might be called to serve. After presenting all possibilities to the group, I concentrated on those with cultural constraints, specifically English as a second language. We kept in contact often through email and utilized the virtual classroom function of the Blackboard software. My presentation is shown in slides 7 and 8 of the PowerPoint, which begins with “Cultural restraints: English as a second language”. The “Transcript” document is my oral presentation. My group delivered a very successful presentation that gave way to enlightening discussion on Blackboard.
The second evidence is a group project from LIBR 247 (Vocabulary Design). This project called for very strong collaboration as it was necessary for us to integrate all information into one document. Unlike the Information Competency project, each member did not have a separate topic to focus on, but integrated findings into one document. For this multi-sectioned project, we set weekly goals and gave daily updates via email or scheduled group discussion on the Blackboard chat software. An example of one of these group meetings is shown in the piece of evidence titled, Metadata Schema – Chat transcript. It shows collaboration, attention and evaluation to each member’s idea and friendly compromise. Each section of the Metadata Schema – Group Project evidence was created by each member writing about a certain user group, the existing information retrieval system and metadata schemas they brought to the group and examples of our stock footage metadata. We exchanged our findings with each other and a member was chosen to combine the information into each section. Each member had a different section to combine findings. For the metadata schema, each member came up with fields for example stock footage. The group collaborated and a consensus was reached on the fields that would be used. Page 35 of the document is a discussion section that illustrates problems we came across and how we dealt with them as a group.
There are many other instances of group work and oral presentations, but the maximum amount of examples allowed was reached. I am happy to say that I have formed lasting relationships with all my MLIS peers that were in my groups. We often exchange job announcements and other helpful tips. Being able to function in a group not only helps to reach a goal, but also form some wonderful relationships within the profession.