Jeanette C. Mills
MLIS Portfolio
Technology
During the seven years I have been in the MLIS program, I have seen significant changes in technology. A computer and a variety of software was already an essential part of my work at the Art Slide Library in 1995, but the all-encompassing significance of email and the Web had not yet fully hit. Shortly that significance would begin to grow exponentially. In Winter Quarter 1996 I took a class from Professor Sam Oh titled Building and Managing Internet Resources. This class, only the second I had taken in the MLIS program, was very challenging, both in terms of the quantity of work and in the number of new things we were learning. I came away from the class with a real appreciation for the World Wide Web in general and for HTML coding specifically.
By 2000, my staff at the Art Slide Library and I were regularly using the Web as reference resources. We especially were using it to help us do research for cataloging slides, and we were just starting to use it for researching artist authority information. None of us had the same bookmarks on our computers, so it became clear that we needed something that would allow us all to link to the same websites more efficiently. With the help of staff and iSchool volunteers, I put together a list of our most used websites and taught myself the basics of Microsoft FrontPage. The resulting one-screen webpage has been used as the home page on all our computers since then.
Within a year after beginning to use this home page, it became clear to all of us that we needed a more in-depth resources page. One of the biggest challenges of moving to a website from a single webpage has been thinking through the organizational structure of the files before even beginning to create the site. Also, with so many more websites out there now, it has become much more difficult to choose the ones that are most important to our work. I recently have created a site that we are just beginning to test at the Art Slide Library. With the new website file structure in place, it should be easier to modify and improve the site as needed. My plan is to continue working on this site after I get feedback from my staff. This will involve perhaps altering and/or expanding the levels below some of the pages, and I will use Dreamweaver to do more complex site design.
The Web is something so common now in most people’s lives in the United States that we tend to take it for granted. It helps me appreciate it more to have the historical perspective of being a user since the early days and to have learned how to create webpages at the beginning of my MLIS coursework. Even though I would not call myself a Web designer, I am very glad I have the skills and knowledge to be able to create webpages and sites on my own.
Please note that
some linked files are in PDF format and require Acrobat Reader.
