Introduction

My Journey Towards Information Work

This e-Portfolio brings together the work of my two years in San José State University's Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program. I earned my AB in Sociology from Princeton University in 2013 and went directly into the PhD program in Sociology at UCLA. There, my master's thesis on arthouse movie theaters sparked an interest in film preservation that stayed with me long after I left the program, a year after completing my MA in 2015.

I then spent seven years in market research as a data analyst, work that sharpened my ability to organize complex information and draw meaning from it, even as it made clear that numbers were not where my heart lay. What I have always loved most is working with language and ideas, and I had long suspected that I belonged in an archive, helping preserve the historical record for the researchers of today and tomorrow.

I knew an MLIS would be the path there, but it took a turning point to set me on it: when my market research position was eliminated, I found myself applying for analyst roles that held no real interest for me, and I realized it was time to pursue the work I truly wanted.

Along the way, I have found my focus in digital preservation and collections. Having grown up alongside personal computing, from Windows 3.1 to the present, I have watched firsthand how quickly digital formats and platforms come and go. That experience has given me a deep appreciation for how much of our culture now lives in digital form, and for how fragile that record can be. Born-digital and digitized materials pose real challenges for long-term preservation and for maintaining provenance, and those are exactly the problems I want to help solve. Audiovisual materials hold a particular draw for me, though I am eager to bring my skills to archival work in any form.

The work collected in this e-Portfolio demonstrates my proficiency in the 14 Core Competencies of the MLIS program and my readiness to begin this next chapter.

Organization of This e-Portfolio

This e-Portfolio is organized into four sections: this Introduction, the Areas of Competency, a Conclusion, and a Statement of Affirmation. For each Area of Competency, I explain the meaning of the competency and why it is important to me and to the information profession as a whole, followed by multimedia evidence demonstrating my proficiency in that area. The Conclusion offers my reflections on the program, the strengths I will carry forward, and my goals for the next stage of my career. Finally, the Statement of Affirmation affirms that all work presented here is my own original work.

Methodology

I have been preparing this e-Portfolio since I began the program. For each course I completed, I created a folder in Google Drive where I saved all of my finished assignments. I also made use of the Student Success Planner introduced in INFO 203 - Online Learning: Tools and Strategies for Success. At the end of each semester, I logged every completed assignment in the planner, along with a description of the work, a link to the corresponding document in Google Drive, and the competencies it demonstrated. I recorded work from internships, volunteer positions, and extracurricular groups as well. This system made it easy to identify the strongest evidence for each competency when the time came. As I began the e-Portfolio itself, I reviewed the e-Portfolio handbook, blogs, and example portfolios, and revisited readings from my courses that would help in drafting the introduction to each Area of Competency.

To build my e-Portfolio site, I chose Astro, a static-site framework, and customized a template called Patrika, editing it in Visual Studio Code and managing my changes through GitHub. The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which automatically publishes a new version whenever I push changes to GitHub. Supporting evidence is presented in two ways: some documents are stored directly within the site itself, while others are currently linked from my Google Drive. I plan to migrate the remaining files into the site over time so that the full portfolio is self-contained and does not depend on an outside service. Because the site's content is stored as plain-text Markdown files under version control, every revision is documented and the site's pages are stored in open, durable formats, principles that align closely with the digital preservation practices I hope to work with in my career.

I strove to complete about two competency areas each week, working around my internship and family commitments. This pace left ample time at the end for review, feedback from my advisor, and revisions.