The first of these two assignments is from my second semester of graduate school at the University of Alabama, Fall of ’24. I absolutely loved LS502: Research Methods as a course we dove into more obscure research methodologies I had not encountered or discussed the philosophical frameworks that underlay certain methodologies. Despite those being the parts of the class that I enjoyed the most, I chose a relatively straightforward project from the course. In this assignment we chose a research question, conducted a summative literature review, and an executive summary to make suggestions based on the evidence we had gathered from the research.

              The second submission was completed in my final semester at SLIS as the fourth assignment in LS 505: Collection Development with Professor Tiffany Duck. For this submission I combined the first assignment, Community Analysis, with the fourth assignment, Collection Development and Fiscal Management. The two assignments fit together as a wonderful demonstration of the use of evidence to inform library and information practices. In the first assignment we conducted research on an academic library of our choosing, and then using that research, designed a small collection that could potentially be of use at that library.

              I felt more comfortable working on the second assignment than I did the first. In part this was due to the fact that we were able to use evidence we had gathered to shape our own decisions. I feel comfortable justifying the decisions I’ve made, but it’s very different putting an evidence-based plan into action on your own than it is using that evidence to persuade an imaginary executive panel. If the first assignment were occurring in real life, I would have likely had the chance to get to know, or at the very least meet, the people I would be communicating with in the executive summary. Situations like this are easier when they happen in reality than the land of hypotheticals.