At the beginning of the third week, we visited the School of Information Sciences, it is one of the most important colleges at the University of Illinois and the most specialized in Information Sciences and libraries in the world.
As well as, school gives a doctorate and a master degree in Information Sciences and libraries. We met the Professors Linda and Terry, who gave us a presentation about the college and its programs and numbers of students and majors. I like the teaching methods at the college, and I wished I was one of its PhD students, but I’m studying Educational Technology at my university. I’m really thinking when I’ll finish my study, I’ll come to the University of Illinois to study information science in iSchool.
At the end of the first day of the third week, we attended a workshop about Preservation and Conservation, Media Preservation and Collections Care, and did tours in the Preservation Lab at University of Illinois Library. I have gained a lot of experience from this workshop, especially since my library has a lot of old material such as microfilm, tapes and microfiche. Also, I learned the methods used to protect these materials to be applied in my library. This was one of the most important and most comprehensive workshops that I attended in this program.
On the second day of the early morning, we went to Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana, and our tour began at the Indianapolis Public Library. The Indianapolis Public Library is a library aimed to enrich lives and build communities through lifelong learning. Its vision is to be a center of knowledge, community life, and innovation for Indianapolis.
The beauty of this public library is that it is made up of two old and new buildings. The old building was built in 1917 with a magnificent architectural design that features drawings and decorations in all its parts and contains a collection of special collections covering the ancient history of Indianapolis. The new building was established in 2007 and contains a library for children and adults and there is a lot of activities for all age groups, and Special Collections Room containing a variety of archival adult and children’s materials, books by local authors, photographs, scrapbooks, typescripts, manuscripts, autographed editions, letters, newspapers and magazines. This is what our public libraries in the Arab world lack.
Through our visit to a number of public libraries in Chicago and Indianapolis, we found that there was a great interest in children and adults and focus on their creative ideas, development. This is one of the objectives of this program in which we participate. I was very upset because my country we have a public and national library, but without these ideas that focus on children and develop their creative ideas.
A group of library workers gave a number of presentations about Emerging Technologies and Community Engagement, Partnership and Promotion in Indianapolis Public Library during Best Practices in Early, Digital Technology, Interactive Technology for Kids Adult Digital Journey, Digital Indy, Systemwide approaches to engagement and Marketing.
The third day began with a meeting with the Dean of the University of Illinois Library. He talked about the Library’s budget and the support of the library in order to continue developing and providing services to students and researchers. He talked about future plans and how to deal with students from different cultures. The meeting was great and enjoyable and filled with ideas that can be used in my library and the development of some projects that have been initiated to provide the best services to the library’s visitors.
After that, Susan Avery, who works in Instructional Services Librarian at Undergraduate Library, presented a presentation about the technology used in the classroom. She talked about the library services for students such as LibGuides and Clickers, which we used in the lab as a way of knowing the students’ views during a lecture, and talked about the creating video files through some programs, for example the Camtasia program, this program is used to create and modify video files. I used this program during my studies in the doctoral program.
At the end of the day we attended a workshop about Library Assessment and Academic Libraries. Where we learned about assessment in academic libraries, and how to evaluate academic performance and impact. The benefit of this workshop was to evaluate the work of the libraries and the services they provide through different evaluation tools. In my library, we use many means to assess the work of the libraries. Each year, we provide an annual report on the work of the library and another one on the Library’s strategy and plans for the future.
On the fourth day we learned about the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in library work by attending a GIS workshop on. We created maps using Google Map and identified the participants’ libraries on the map. We have used and implemented some programs using geographic information systems to learn about the population and statistics of the state of Illinois. The workshop was enjoyable and most of the time for the practical application and how to benefit from GIS in the work of libraries and most important inter-library loan services. I will implement GIS services in my library to get full information about all the libraries we deal with in inter-library loan services.
At the end of the day, we learned about the methods used to deal with data management and the risks to which the data are subjected and how to use it, and this is very interesting for me because it was my subject in the master’s degree.
The last day of the third week was a training program about Strengthening Innovative Library Leaders (SILL). SILL is an innovative leadership training program for public and community librarians around the world. The training divided into 4 interactive modules focusing on Leadership, Innovation, Planning, and Communication. We chose to have trained around Module 2: Library Leaders as Innovators and Module 3: Library Leaders with a Plan.
In Module 2: Library Leaders as Innovators, we have given examples of how libraries can be innovative in their responses to local problems. We have proposed an innovative idea for a new program or service to meet the needs of users in our libraries, and we have formed groups in a group activity that designs an innovative solution to a problem in academic libraries. Each of us has developed an innovative idea to apply to our libraries, transforming this innovative idea into an Action Plan in Module 3. It was my innovation idea about converting large collection of newspaper files in my library into searchable files by using the OCR Program.
In Module 3: Library Leaders with a Plan, we learned how to create goals and plans by writing action plans for the innovative ideas we chose to implement in our libraries. Through this module, we have been able to develop the goals for the innovative ideas we have chosen and formulate the action plan that I will implement in my library of the innovative idea that I have chosen.