At the first day in America, it was like a dream which becomes true. It was On 23rd May 2018 to participate in the Professional Development Program for Library Leaders and Innovators. Actually, I’ve got mixed feelings about this new experience, I was so excited and Curious, but I’m rather worried about the different languages which are used in this country with different people. After that, all of these thoughts and fears were overcome by meeting my colleagues who were great and friendly.
At the beginning, On the first day, we became acquainted with all other participants from different countries of the world, but in different way of acquaintance, that we didn’t present ourselves, but we presented each other for the audience. And this what I really liked most. After that, we did tour of University Campus, the Main Library and Undergraduate Library, we know the main parts of the library and met the nice staff. The tour was long, it was for 4 hours, but, we really liked it, it was full of enjoyment and benefits.
On the second day we created a blog for each of us through the WordPress site, and we made profile for each person, and we were asked to send our reflection of what we did every weekend, then make brief interview with staff members to discuss that. So, that work had begun. During the day, we were invited to Library Buddies Lunch and had lunch with the library staff and had great new experience about countries and cultures. At the end of the day, we did tour in Oak Street Off-site Storage Facility which has high density Storage Facility for the University Library which has the unique role of maximizing preservation of the items. We really were surprised about the large size of the Storage Facility, which contains more than 4 million books and the way books were stored. I hope that we have the same way of storing books our library.
The third day was one of the most beautiful days of the week. The whole day was dedicated to a DISC Workshop on the style and personality of each of us. We answered a set of questions by questionnaire and received a 20-page file containing each person’s own style and information about their personality. The course was long and tiring but we enjoyed it very much, especially that the teacher was very good in her style and gave us a set of gifts during the Workshop.
At the end of the week, we were invited to dinner at the one of the ISchool’s teacher. There were a lot of nice people and it was a fun time. We talked about many things, about cultures, customs and traditions in every country, they were really wonderful.
This week was a long and arduous in which I gained a lot of goals related to communicating, exchanging cultures, and dividing work within a library and distributing tasks to their employees. All of these gave me enough experience to improve the administrative process of my work within my library and develop them as much as possible.