PLO4 Lead and manage people and products in an equitable, just, and culturally competent manner.
Primary Learning Outcome 4, centers itself around leadership. Leadership, by definition, cannot be accomplished alone. One cannot lead if there is nobody or nothing to manage. Therefore, leadership is reliant on community engagement, and information. PLO4 and the subparts guide students to become communicative, equitable, just, and culturally competent leaders of people and products. Having this primary learning outcome present throughout the program, asked me to realize my own responsibilities as I enter a professional position leading a diverse population of students through information literacy and research, supervising a diverse population of student staff members, and managing programs through an equitable and just lens. PLO4 and its subparts provided me with skills to fulfill my goals confidently, leading in a manner that is critically engaged, thoughtful, and culturally competent and always centered around communication.
4.1 Apply leadership and management principles and practices to direct and manage people and projects.
I interpret this learning outcome as a route for MLIS students to build their own definition of a ‘good leader’ and to then put that definition into practice by figuring out how to best manage both people and projects. In the MLIS program, each course had some sort of group work component, which meant one had to trust and rely on their classmates, while working to build the trust and reliance of their classmates in the group.
I fell into the habit of asking 2 questions at the beginning of each group project. First, I would ask what my group members preferred form of communication was, whether it be email, teams chat, within the working document, or within the digital course room. Once preferences were established, I would then create the communication chain and or group documents. After that, I normally would outline the assignment deliverables and ask the group how they would best like to divide the workload. I found that these two initial questions were a great way to get a feel for the comfort levels and work expectations of my group mates. This set of questions also commonly got our first meeting together off to a proper start, talking about future communication, and workload divisions for balance and equity.
I believe a good leader does not have to hold a leadership position; they are individuals who show up for their team, communicate, and assist when necessary. A good leader is an informed, trusted, and reliable individual. I try my best to show up as such when I am in an academic or professional setting. When I cannot, I look for an individual with those qualities for support and guidance.
Example group projects:
IST717 Library Management Center Analysis Project
IST674 Weekly ‘Current Reading Round-Up’ (No document to share, weekly virtual group meetings)
IST613 ‘Birds of a Feather’ group (No document to share, weekly virtual group meetings)
4.2 Use positional power to advocate for information equity and justice.
An individual is not smarter than the whole. In a library position, the librarian is tasked with making decisions based on user needs, not individual preference. When serving a user base, it is best to understand the full complexity and diversity of their user population to then respond with resources that best meet the diverse and complex needs. Recognizing how and why inequity and injustice present themselves in a library setting and then working to combat those issues is a best practice for any librarian working at any library.
For an assignment, I was tasked with interviewing a ‘library leader’, and I had the opportunity to interview a life-long role model of mine. Maureen Squier is the library systems director for Questar III BOCES, a previous president of NYLA SSL, a MLIS graduate of Syracuse, and my childhood best friend’s mother. She invited me (I invited myself) over for dinner one night, and we were able to spend the time discussing librarianship, and her route to a leadership position. She is a leader who uplifts and supports everyone on her team, giving opportunities for presentations, resource sharing, and mentorship. Maureen leads with kindness, always follows up, always sends a ‘thank you’ email, and always shares resources when applicable. She is the embodiment of PLO4.2, and a librarian I look up to in that regard.
Another assignment, one that asked for me to use positional power to advocate for equity and justice, rather than to learn and speak with someone via an interview, I was asked to create a personalized literacy approach for a struggling student. The struggling student was imagined, but I based him off a child I knew, who I then carried the plan off with to support his literacy learning process. The lesson plan was designed for a second-grade student struggling with managing his emotions and completing his schoolwork when it was challenging. His personalized literacy approach was shaped around reading and listening to age-appropriate literature about emotions, including both comic books, and audiobooks. By building his emotional intelligence and his literacy skills, the intent was to support his emotional bandwidth, while assisting him with verbalizing and communicating his emotions. Through recreational reading, he was strengthening his literacy skills, supporting his in-class learning. He is not a traditional student, he may at times be labeled as a troublemaker, that does not and should not stop him from access to learning. It takes longer for him, and that is okay. He has more to learn, he needs to learn how to communicate his emotions. Using my position to advocate for his right to learn, he has been reading literature that interests him while simultaneously teaching him regulation practices. He expressed to me the other day “I know I have a better day when I start it off in a good mood”.
Examples:
IST717 Library Leader Interview
IST668 Personalized Literacy Approach
4.3 Apply principles of equity and justice to ensure ethical decision-making.
When applying equity and justice to ensure ethical decision-making, there might be the perspective that these ‘hoops’ call for ‘more work’ for the librarian. When discussing accessibility routes for web creation and lesson planning, there is no doubt- there is more work to be done on the back end of things. Whether that be evaluating audio-to-text, inserting descriptions of visuals, curating accurate translations, or designing a lesson plan with the UDL framework. The extra steps bring the librarians and their users closer to equitable and just access to information, which ensures that both users and librarians can show up at their best and do the work that needs to be done. When work is completed ethically, with equity and justice in the foreground, it becomes more complex for the facilitator, while simultaneously providing ease of access to the user, giving them a degree of comfort through this support. In the end, it is a valuable way to provide information to a userbase and to exemplify the value of a library.
In this program, I have observed libraries for different courses. In IST564 Accessible Library & Information Services, I observed one singular academic library throughout the course, assessing their accessibility, their ADA compliance, their provided assistive technology, their policies and their userbase. Applying disability justice to their current collections, programs, and facilities, I created a report and recommendation both for their assistive technologies, and the library overall. In another course, IST668 Literacy through School Libraries, I observed a school library and recommended a school program for students to build their critical thinking, and visual literacy through public history and primary sources.
Examples:
IST564 Assistive Technology Report and Recommendation
IST668 Applying Critical Thinking: type of literacy program
4.4 Solve problems using empathy, evidence, and critical and creative thinking.
It is always best to back problem-solving decisions with research. In my opinion, the best evidence and the best research always includes themes of empathy, critical thinking, and creativity. To be a successful problem-solver, one must be willing to be wrong, to be surprised, to communicate, and to handle those experiences effectively. To communicate effectively, in or outside of a library lens; empathy, creative thinking, and critical analysis will only support you and those you are communicating with. This is especially true when conversing about problems and how to best solve them.
A major theme in this program was to identify and analyze a specific library, identify an issue, and create a recommendation for change. The strongest recommendations were rooted in empathy, evidence, and critical and creative thinking. Within a project for IST672 Public Library as an Institution, I interviewed a Librarian, conducted an issue analysis, and developed a strategic plan for a specific public library. Focusing on the housing crisis, I recommended programming for housing support and the creation of a libguide for housing and homelessness resources. In IST668 Literacy through School Libraries, I designed a personalized literacy approach for a student experiencing problems with schoolwork and emotional regulation. With both projects, I focused my decisions on creative thinking, empathy, critical thinking, and evidence.
Examples:
IST668 Personalized Literacy Approach
IST672 Public Library Community Issue Analysis
4.5 Facilitate communication with users, colleagues, and community stakeholders.
Different forms of communication call for one to show up differently in each scenario while keeping previously discussed empathy, creativity, and critical thinking in mind. Librarians communicating to users will be different than when they are communicating to colleagues, than when communicating with community stakeholders. For a librarian to effectively facilitate these conversations, there must be goals, respect, and an ability to both hear and utilize any feedback. There should never be an expectation for a one-sided conversation in the library realm.
In IST613 Planning, Marketing & Assessment, I spent the quarter partnered with a librarian and their library. I had to understand the library, its users, team, stakeholders, institutions, and placement. I had to then identify a change, back up the change with evidence/benchmarking for value and success, to then create a project plan, marketing plan, and assessment plan for the change. Once completed, I presented the work to the partner librarian and their team. The marketing and assessment aspects called for a deep level of communication with users, colleagues, and community stakeholders. I needed to propose how communicate the change through their usual communication routes, and I needed to design assessment strategies that ensured user/stakeholder/colleague feedback. When presenting, I left about 20 minutes of time afterwords for feedback, recommendations, and questions from my partner librarian and his colleagues.
During IST672 Public Library as an Institution, I had to create a strategic plan for a public library regarding a specific community issue. To do this, I had to understand the library users, staff, and stakeholders. I had to properly communicate the reasoning, create a SWOT analysis, outline the goals, provide supporting data, and supporting evidence. This strategic plan was the culmination of a quarter where I intentionally had assignments leading me towards a deeper understanding of the library and its service population. These assignments and others like them, helped me build my communication strategies to effectively facilitate library issues, verbalize them, and build pathways for improvement.
Examples:
IST672 Public Library Strategic Plan
4.6 Direct and participate in responsive public relations, marketing, and development.
As discussed, communication is key to any effective leadership, in or outside of a defined leadership role. Communication routes within librarianship exist in a library’s public relations, their marketing, and their development, especially when communicating a library’s value. To react to ever-changing social and economic patterns in an effective and positive way, librarians can set themselves and their institution up for success.
Examples of a program assignment that asked MLIS students to practice this PLO would be the IST613 Library Planning, Marketing & Assessment final project, and the IST564 Accessible Library & Information Services final project. The final project for IST613, I suggested a partnership between an academic and a public library both located in the same town. This looked like a communication chain with both the academic library, the public library, and their stakeholders. I had to understand both userbases, to develop both a marketing strategy and an assessment strategy that reached community members, the public library staff, students, faculty and staff at the college, and the academic library staff and faculty. Within my final prject for IST564, I reccomended a signage overhaul for the library I was observing. I suggested that all signage in the space be uniform, include braille, and could be altered when needed, I suggested that signs include QR codes that could direct users to translations if needed and that the signs had uniform fonts using high contrast colors for low vision individuals. To best prepare for a project like this, I also researched local sign companies and relevant grant opportunities to mitigate costs. This suggestion grew as my understanding of disability justice, and as my understanding of true accessibility evolved.
Examples:
4.7 Manage information resources through the information life-cycle, including processes of information creation, collection development, representation, organization, preservation, curation, access, and dissemination.
Managing information resources is a daunting and complex task. There are many key components to successfully doing so. A librarian or their colleague must create, collect, represent, organize, preserve, curate, access and disseminate a myriad of information resources when supporting resources throughout the information life-cycle. As a student, this PLO subpart presented itself or parts of itself within many projects.
The strongest example of this PLO showing up within my work would be from IST616 Information Resources: Organization and Access. As a group mate, I worked with a team to create a policy manual, metadata schema, and work form for a selected collection in an imagined scenario. Working with a collection of planters to track inventory of a plant shop and their shop website. Together, we defined the intent of use for the collection and how we organized and labeled each planter. We created information to describe and organize this collection of planters to best represent each object. We used the descriptors to catalog the items, and curate an online web presence for potential customers to access and understand each collection item, and for them to discern which object or planter best fit their needs. Completing this project showed how the complexity of the back end organizational work caused an ease of access and knowledge for customers or users of a specific collection.
Example:
MeganBetke 