The Field Project entailed working with Dr. Yan Quan Liu on
a project concerning public digital libraries. Dr. Liu had done a study earlier concerning the impact of digital services
and resources in public libraries in Connecticut as a pilot project, and had gone on to conduct a study of the impact of digital
libraries in New England public libraries. I worked with the results of this second survey to create a powerpoint presentation
for a Conference, prepare a final report and develop an article for publication.
I helped prepare a powerpoint presentation of the information gathered
in the New England study for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the ASIS&T, held in Austin Texas, November 3-9. The conference
title was "Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All". The title of the Powerpoint was "Enhancing Digital
Information Access in Public Libraries". Dr. Liu was one of the presenters at the conference.
Under
Dr. Liu's direction I helped write a final report of the study findings to send to the libraries that took part in the survey.
This was difficult because I had not taken part in the initial gathering of information process. This included compiling a
great deal of data and formulating it into charts and tables and condensing it for reporting purposes.
The
information from the final reports along with the graphs and tables was used as part of an article for publication. The difficult
part of the endeavor was adhering to the demands of the publishing houses. The final report was done in one font and using
APA for bibliographic information, The publisher wanted a different font, different stye of graphs, etc., so that everything
had to be redone. The article was not accepted by the first publisher and had to be resubmitted to another which was accepted
for publication and was printed in 2009 in the Public libraries magazine.
Skills Learned:
Extensive
research and data compilation, development of reports, article for publication, including adherence to publishing standards
and preparation of presentation materials for an industry focused conference.
