Group 3 Participation

My contribution to our project was in the planning stage. I helped with brainstorming ideas, and I assisted the group on site in analyzing the libraries and finding unique and pertinent material to cover related the ideas of access.

I thought this project was very unique and interesting. Being my first real college project, it was a refreshing change from papers and exams. Furthermore, it really made me think about the concepts that we covered and their real life effects. It was interesting for me because in doing this project I went to the Madison Public Library for the first time, and it was interesting to think could I gain value from the provided services? What if I needed to use the computers for school work; could I have performed all necessary information retrieval, aggregation, and creation tasks to investigate the multimedia resources recomended by my professors and research and write my papers? I probably could, but with time constraints on computer access and limited access to computer database conduits and software, it would be harder than using College Library, my laptop, or any of the other libraries on campus.

Studying the libraries made the material seem real. Being from an upper-middle class town, I have little experience with libraries that serve such a diverse community as the Madison Public Library does. Living in a town that has more taxes per capita than Madison, my first impression was that being an older facility, the Madison Central Library would be subpar. What I discovered was something in between a taj mahal and a "yellow palace," lacking in adequate computer resources for a library of that size, the Madison Public Library still offers a vast array of community resources and reserves to serve the community of Madison.

Overall, this project was a great capstone to LIS 202, and far more engaging than the numerous trade articles in the reader.