Final Blog Post

In this final blog post, I want to look back at the blogging exercise in general for LIS 855: Electronic Resource Management. I found that blogging once a week about the articles for classes helped me stay on top of the readings, and I found that I would have even probably liked to do a most important sentence or a summary for each article if I were to do it over again. I am not certain that this would have helped me much for the quizzes, but it would have made the blog in to a quick reference for the open book tests.

Unlike the first blog that appears at www.digitaltoolsandtrends.blogspot.com, I felt a bit more like I was writing in to a void. To recap that experience, during the course LIS 644, I was asked to keep a blog and a delicious account to keep track of links and tools on the web related to WorldCat. I received a comment from a woman at OCLC, asking me about the project and posing questions to me about one of my blog posts. I found that to be very intriguing: someone was actually reading besides those in the class! In the case of this blog, I felt like the format of the one reading a week made it too tied to the course, which did not draw any outsiders to the blog. It might as well have been a reading diary in a Word document. For this reason, I tried to tie the readings to real life instead of strictly summarizing them.

I felt most engaged with the blog post about the e-book panel, since I had just attended a similar panel at the 2010 Wisconsin Library Association Conference. I was able to draw off of that real life experience and look deeper at the issues surrounding e-publishing. I also find this subject really interesting to my own experiences, having supported e-book readers and the e-book sales site at Sony. Another blog post I enjoyed writing was the one about how copyright has affected me. I believe that I could have kept on writing this for many more paragraphs. I even found that I left some things out, due to the fact that I felt uncomfortable talking about them on a public blog. Even after I posted it, I came up with another 4-5 instances where copyright has affected me. I thought about writing a second, follow-up copyright post, but realized it may have been too much, and I moved on.

I have truly enjoyed the subject matter of this course. I feel that my understanding of ERM has really grown and blossomed in to an understanding of the complexity of this field. I had initially hoped to do my practicum in an ERM setting, and even though I enjoyed my practicum at the Digital Collections immensely, now I wish I had. It seems like there are a lot of jobs out there in this field. I have a better understanding now of what it would take to be an ERM librarian. I have truly loved the portions of the class where we have had guest speakers. The insight in to institutions such as WiLS, Wisconsin Tech Search, and Interlibrary Loan and the way that these groups interface with each other at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is, in my opinion, a unique experience for a Master's student. This is the kind of stuff I came to SLIS for: real hands-on experience, and a view in to the world of libraries.

Thank you for reading!