The Special Libraries Association Student Chapter members have been busy this year representing the group on various committees and projects. Benefiting from SLASC participation were the iSchool Convocation Committee, ScholarWorks, and the SWAG task force.
In 2015, the iSchool began holding convocation ceremonies online instead of on campus to accommodate and honor all of the school’s graduates, regardless of where they live. SLASC member Rachel Salzano sat on this 2015-2016 committee, and she discussed why she decided to join.
“My motivation for participation on the convocation committee was that I wanted to be a part of something extracurricular in the school that I could put on my resume,” she said. “I like to do volunteer stuff like this, and it sounded like a fun project that wouldn’t involve more than a few hours a week to work on.”
An SLASC member since 2015, Rachel said participating in the student chapter gave her insight that was invaluable with the committee process, which gave her yet another opportunity to connect with others.
“I learned a lot about working in a group of students who aren’t part of your same class. We have group projects in our classes, but all the students we work with in there have at least something in common with us. It is a little different working with a group that isn’t going through the same experiences, necessarily,” she said.
Rachel is slated to graduate in December 2016, and plans to put her experience to use in her career as either a public or law librarian after completing a PhD program in Edinburgh, Scotland.
President-elect Dana Spinney joined the SWAG task force after seeing calls for volunteers. Like Rachel, Dana said the impetus for taking part in the group was to increase her interaction with other students.
“I also like the idea of the project, which was to provide iSchool logo items for purchase by students and alumni, with the proceeds going to a scholarship fund,” Dana said.
“I learned a lot being involved in this task force. It helped me develop my skills working with a group via technology. I learned about surveys, compiling survey information and all of the fine details and communications that need to be considered when putting together a project like this. I also had the opportunity to do research to troubleshoot some of the issues that arose after the site was put together which was a good learning experience. I enjoyed working with the other members of the task force and appreciated we worked well as a team,” she said.
Dana joined SLASC at the beginning of the school year, and she will be taking over the office of SLASC president from Basia Delawska-Elliot, who graduated this month.
Another SLASC member active in the iSchool community, Sarah Liberman has contributed to serving current and future students with her work on the SJSU ScholarWorks page. Knowledge of website construction and maintenance served Sarah well while working on the page, but she acknowledges she had some help along the way.
“I’ve worked on websites for a long time, especially with WordPress. WP has been a great tool, both personally and academically — I’ve used it for about a decade, and plan to use it again in the fall when I do ePortfolio,” said Sarah, who plans to graduate in December. “The ScholarWorks repository is built on a preexisting template developed between the King Library and Digital commons, so I did not start from scratch. I had a lot of support from Bepress, which runs Digital Commons, and received great feedback from Heather (Kiger), Basia (Delawska-Elliot), and King Library Digital Commons Liaison April Gilbert.”
While building the SLASC repository, Sarah created a how-to tutorial future members can refer to and update as needed.
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