Major Paper
Course: IS 213: Issues in Librarianship
(Libraries: Values, Barriers and Interventions)
Justification:
In the last quarter of my first year, I had a small crisis of faith concerning archiving. I had taken a variety of archiving/media archiving classes in the previous two quarters but I wasn't being as intellectually fulfilled by them as I would have liked to. Furthermore, I began to think about my future in the industry and I realized that I didn't necessarily want to limit myself to working in archives. So I decided to make the switch to librarianship on a whim and it ended up helping to get me out of my perceived academic stagnancy.
The final assignment for this course was 40% of the grade and we were allowed to either do a group project assignment or pursue an independent term paper topic.
The prompt was as follows:
You (individually) will propose, research and write a term paper of roughly 15-20 pages that covers a topic directly discussed or inspired by the themes and guiding questions of the course.Given that what I was researching the neo-liberalization of academic institutions for the class I wanted to continue that pursuit and address the topic of alienation in student communities and how the library can bolster or work against it. I felt it important to put this paper into my portfolio not only because the ideas that I researched impacted my issue paper but also because it showcases the shift I had from media archiving to librarianship within the UCLA MLIS program.