This has been my favourite assignment so far. I love creating something that I can actually use in my own setting. I guess I am a very practical person! I have chosen to build a website for my library because we currently don’t have one. In fact, there is no option available for our students (or teachers for that matter) to search our catalogue of over 16,000 items.
After “speaking” to so many others who work in different school districts and reading their blogs I now see this as a major problem and not just an inconvenience as I did when I began this course.
Creating a website with catalogue access is something that I have wanted to do for a long time but this course not only gave me the opportunity to work towards this it also gave me the chance to do some research on other library sites and to think much more critically about the notion of access to the collection. I am very excited to get a chance to pitch this idea to my administrator with some sound rationale behind it.
Particularly helpful for me was having to think about who would need to be involved and what challenges might present themselves as I moved forward with this project. It caused me to really slow down and think through who might be helpful, from whom approval would be needed, and how I might be able to head off possible complications. A very valuable assignment for me.