Project Instructions

Your information organization has received a grant to develop a small collection, and your group has been put in charge of managing the grant.  All of the items in the collection will be of a single genre or type of material of your choice and it is a medium that your organization has not handled before.  As a first step, your group has been asked to prepare a web-based report that explores the important issues and approaches to dealing with this collection.  You will post the URL of the report on the last day of class to the bulletin board set up for this purpose.  You will choose one group member to do a short live presentation on the project during the final class period.  Other roles which individual members can fill include schedule coordination and site editing.

In organizing the group to complete this project, it will probably work best for each member of the group to take primary responsibility for one of the topics.  Once the individual areas of responsibility have been worked out, each individual investigates his/her topic and collaborates with the Webmistress/Webmaster to put together the webpage(s) needed to convey the desired information (e.g., preservation of this type of material).  The website should include a simple introductory page that points to the individual pages.  In addition to hosting your website on a GSLIS server, there are a number of other options for setting up your website, including those described here: http://groups.lis.illinois.edu/itdweb/sitebuilder/intro.php

For some example projects from spring semester 2016, see:

Maps: https://smootemaps.wordpress.com/about/
Music: https://mosatchmo.wordpress.com/
Picture books: http://akopp1518.wix.com/lis501picturebooks

Resources that will be useful to you as background for completing this assignment include:

Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records Collection Development Tutorial

http://www.azlibrary.gov/libdev/continuing-education/cdt

Smyth, Elaine B. (1999). A practical approach to writing a collection development policy.Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship 14(1): 27-31. [e-journal] [Locate full text fromhttp://www.library.illinois.edu/orr/?mode=J]

Required components:

Report: (15 points)

Organize your web-based report around the pertinent topics of this course:

use and users (who are they/what are their information seeking needs)
collections (what type of collection material is proposed, what are the likely sources, what type of use is anticipated)
organization (item description/metadata scheme and physical arrangement of items)
subject access (subject vocabulary, classification, controlled or uncontrolled)
preservation (preservation considerations and strategies for this material).

Include your own findings and analysis as well as relevant resources for someone interested in learning more about organization of and access to this type of material. Post the URL for the final report to the forum created for this purpose on the day of your presentation.  

Individual component: (5 points)

By the day following your presentation each group member will turn in a brief summary (no more than one page) of your own observations about the project itself. Note any elements of the project to which you directly contributed, anything that you think went especially well, or that you would have liked to do differently.  Submit this through Moodle.