This e-Portfolio was created in fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Library and Information Science degree offered at the San José State University iSchool. This portfolio documents fourteen competencies that I, as a librarian, should possess at the end of the entire program. For each competency, I describe what I believe the competency means, how my coursework and life experience helped prepare me for the competency, and I include several pieces of evidence for each competency to demonstrate my knowledge and skills for that particular competency. Much of the evidence is taken from assignments and discussions I have done throughout the program, which I started in the fall of 2010.  I also include my Statement of Philosophy in which I describe my professional goals, what I believe librarians should focus on as information workers, and what aspects of librarianship are critical at this particular point in history.

When I began the process of writing the competencies for this e-portfolio and the actual amount of work that would be required dawned on me, I freaked out. I work full time, I have 3 kids and they each need to get somewhere at different times every day, I volunteer at the local elementary school and on-line, and I have troubles saying no to most requests. I just could not imagine how I would get through all fourteen essays and a Statement of Philosophy by April 18^th. I made contingency plans for when I would miss the deadline and not graduate. I complained about the injustice of it all. Then I got to work. Today is April 5^th, almost two full weeks before the drop dead date, and I’m pretty much done.

The panic did not subside until I had completed (and passed) 5 competency essays by the end of February. I had figured out a system! Having this system in place made things infinitely easier as I had figured out how to predict how long it would take me to complete an essay. I could count how many days it would take to finish. My system would not have worked without two very important resources: “The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts” edited by Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon, published in 2008 and “Information Services Today: An Introduction” edited by Sandra Hirsh, published in 2015.

Every time I would start a new competency, I would first read the related chapters in both books. This would help jog my memory about what constitutes the competency (recall that I have been working on this degree for six years now). Once I had a good grasp on the competency, I would go look for references. I scoured the King Library databases and the list of e-books, many of which are used for MLIS courses. I looked at the textbooks used for the courses that addressed the competency and tried to get copies if they were available through the public library. I not only looked at the textbooks for the courses I took, but also the textbooks for all the courses that addressed each competency. This gave me a much greater pool of resources from which to gather related information and it guaranteed that I would find some of the materials at the local library and some as e-books. After gathering what I could find, I found that the resources I had more than covered the competency.

The first information I added to the competency document was the resources. I would then skim/read the resources to glean the most important aspects of the competency and add these as major sections of the document.  I would then work on writing those sections by diving deeper into just those topics.

This process of writing what each competency entailed helped me to identify the evidence I used. By the time I had completed writing about the competency I knew what evidence I would present. Because I have been in the program for so long and been through three different Learning Management Systems, I learned to save everything in the format I was most comfortable with rather than the LMS format de jure. I saved two copies of each item on two different external hard drives. I kept everything from every course I took including discussions, assignments and even assignment descriptions given to us by the instructor. This helped to tie the goal of the assignment or discussion to the competency.  Once I found the evidence, I was able to show how it related to the competency and the document was basically done.

One thing I would like to note is that after writing the first competency completely in Canvas, I quickly abandoned that approach for first writing the document in Microsoft Word and then transferring the verbiage and images over to Canvas section by section. I kept losing all my work on the first essay every time I would go look for some information and forget to save what I had written before jumping to a different website by mistake (instead of opening a new tab on the browser). My children learned some colorful new language that day.

Now that I am at the end of the tunnel (and it’s bright!) and I don’t have to fall back on contingency plans, I can say with confidence this was the hardest course I’ve taken in the program, but also the best. It forced me to think about what I learned and how I can apply what I learned to future situations. It is completely different from writing a thesis, which is usually narrowly focused on a single topic. I was originally planning on doing a thesis for this program but I ran out of time (I am running up against the limit for finishing the program) and now I am happy I chose the e-portfolio option. I certainly would never have reflected as deeply as I have on everything I’ve learned here without having done the e-portfolio. This is the first time I have seen and participated in this approach to learning and I think I may just use it in the future to help me to gain a 30,000 foot level of understanding of the work I have done during my career as a research scientist.