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Lauren Corder

A photo of Lauren Corder

University of Washington

Distance Master of Library and Information Science

Technical Skills

Never having worked in a library I had only a vague idea of the types of librarianship that exist. I knew, however, that I enjoyed working with computers and the technical side of things, so in my first two years I took as many courses in the 540's decade as I could. I did not know into what type of library career these courses could take me...until I enrolled in LIS 587 (Library Technology Systems) in the Winter quarter of my third year of the program.

It was in this course that I learned what a "systems" librarian does. The courses I had taken were preparing me to work with integrated library systems, databases, and information retrieval systems.

Languages

A large part of learning about how to work with computers is becoming familiar with the languages that they will recognize. I am fluent in German, having learned it well when I lived in Germany as a high school exchange student and later as a Fulbright scholar at Universität Mannheim. German has a rather complex grammar that I enjoyed learning. Thus, learning the grammar of machine readable languages was a fun challenge for me as well.

LIS 541 (Internet Technologies and Applications) furthered the basic knowledge I had of HTML (hypertext markup language) and enabled me to design a basic web site. LIS 540 (Information Systems, Architectures, and Retrieval) introduced me to XML (extensible markup language) which can be tailored to the needs of each of its users. I designed some basic XML for people interested in cars: one file for a purchaser and one for a mechanic. I learned that XML and RSS can be used as methods of "pushing" information to interested parties. I wrote about using these languages to develop information portals, web pages that users customize to pull information from a number of resources.

Markup languages have evolved from their function of simply formatting a page to being conduits to the content of the pages. This is the case with XML and other forms of metadata. LIS 530 (Organization of Information and Resources) introduced me to the Dublin Core metadata element set and its goal of making content findable across disciplines.

Of course, before computers the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Dewey Decimal System, and the Anglo American Cataloging Rules were being used to standardize subjects and the way items are cataloged so that they are findable (Catalogs, Cataloging, and Classification--LIS 531). Items in the catalog now needed to be searchable by computers; thus, the Machine Readable Cataloging system was developed. I found that learning how a MARC record is structured and what its codes mean is invaluable not only for cataloging but also for being able to assist patrons in finding resources through the library's online public access catalog (OPAC).

Would the need for all of these languages disappear if keyword searching were to become refined enough to find everything people need? That is part of what we studied in LIS 544 (Information Retrieval Systems). I evaluated the precision and recall achieved in search query sets when stemming algorithms were built into the search engine and when they were not. Stemming returned a higher proportion of relevant documents.

Developing relevant and correctly structured queries is imperative in order to retrieve relevant data from a database. LIS 543 (Design of Information Systems) taught me the rudiments of MySQL (Structured Query Language) and PHP. I also learned how to install an Apache server on my computer and develop a simple web site with a registration form connected to an SQL database. Here are two screenshots of the site and database I designed:

A web class registration form
web registration form

A screen shot of the database I designed
database

Though my technical skills are basic, I feel that I have developed enough of a foundation that I can learn whatever I will be called upon to learn in the course of my career. I hope to get the opportunity to learn more about databases and SQL.

The two segments that I have covered so far in my portfolio are centered on me and what I have learned. As a person grows, however, her horizons expand to find opportunities for sharing and teaching what has been developed.