Total Hours: 5
Today was the official kickoff of my practicum, a whirlwind of information but all of it exciting! Michael and I started by looking at some general data about the community the library serves using the Madison Neighborhood Indicators Project site, which is great resource for general community analysis as well as specific grant writing numbers. Basically, a crash course of the data shows that the neighborhood is around a quarter each of White, Asian, Latino, and African American residents, which makes for one of the most diverse user communities of any of the MPL branches. In general, median income is about half of the city median, and the unemployment rate is a percent higher than Madison as a whole. Parent education levels are drastically lower than rest of the city, and kindergarden preparedness is only a third of the city wide levels, which prompted Michael to talk about the "education gap" facing the community in South Madison. One of the statistics that surprised me especially was the fact that 90.0% of students in the neighborhood are considered "economically disadvantaged," almost double the average for the city!
Next we spent a bit of time looking at circ stats and program stats for the branch in comparison to the rest of the MPL branches. Michael talked about how he used the stats in the past to reorganize library materials, for example, moving the Spanish-language collection to the high-traffic AV area to make that user population feel more welcome (instead of leaving it hidden away in the awkward area where it was previously). He also talked about changing the look of the children's area, including facing more books out, after seeing how low their stats were in that area. They will be also adding interactive shelves to increase play in the area, something I am excited about seeing put into action later in the summer. But as much as we looked at the circ numbers to get a feel for things, we also talked about how limiting those kind of statistics can be if the "movers and shakers" solely rely on them as a measure of success in a changing information landscape, a theme I have seen woven throughout multiple courses here at SLIS.
We also talked about the importance of community partnerships in the neighborhood and just how many resources there are in South Madison (Urban League, Planned Parenthood, MATC, Boys and Girls Club, the Catholic Multicultural Center, Centro Hispano, Joining Forces for Families etc.). I am especially excited about seeing these partnerships in action and learning more about effective community outreach strategies.
In addition to meeting other branch employees, we also talked a bit more about what I'll be tentatively doing this summer, which may include:
- Planning 2-3 Bubbler Events
- Helping with a Spanish Pre-literacy Program
- Helping with Seed Library Programming and Outreach
- Helping with adult programming like the Created Equal Film Discussion Series and computer classes (if Chris Wagner has enough time to put on the latter this summer)
- Helping with outreach work: tabling at the Juneteeth event in Penn park, attending Neighborhood Resource Team meetings
- Helping out with a major weeding project later in the summer
- Helping out with the Eat, Play, Art event in July
- Shadowing and then working on the reference desk
- Getting trained in Koha
- Getting trained in E-vanced, the "back-end" of the library public calendar
- Going to a Friends of the Library meeting
- Going to a board meeting
I spent an additional hour after I got home looking at the neighborhood data a bit more, doing some background reading of the Bubbler documents Michael shared with me, and just generally trying to process all that I'll be taking on this summer. As digging deeper into community outreach and needs is a part of my learning objectives, I definitely planning on looking at the data in more depth and connecting it to the circ data in the future.
Whew!
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