Competency 1: Foundations of the Profession
INFO 5400: Privacy, Censorship, & Government Legislation Assignment, Fall 2022
This project required the class to write a position paper identifying a specific piece of government legislation that has implications for libraries.
Privacy and censorship are two key issues that information centers must taken into consideration, especially when writing and implementing policies. Throughout my work on this essay, I became familiar with user rights to privacy as well as the responsibility of library professionals to ensure and fight for their patron's right to it. Additionally, the dangers of censorship can be more difficult to identify due to different kinds of censorship. Not only can this come from external forces, but it can happen subconsciously at the personal level. It is important to be aware of these pitfalls in order to avoid, even unintentionally, adhering to personal biases.
As part of this essay, I also researched government legislation that has had an affect on library functions. Some more recent actions such as COVID-19 precautions have affected library functions, as well as additional historically-significant legislation such as the Patriot Act which brought attention to the rights of users in government investigations. Competency 1 deals largely with an understanding of the role, responsibilities and history of the library profession. This assignment illustrates my understanding of Competency 1A, "ethics, values, and foundational principles of the library and information
profession" by familiarizing me with key moments that have shaped our understanding of the rights of user access to information. Similarly, it also demonstrates my commitment to the idea that information professionals have a strong role "in the promotion of democratic
principles and intellectual freedom", as outlined in Competency 1B.
INFO 5400: Library Profile, Fall 2022
This project involved collecting information about a specific library including relevant demographic data, policies, users, programming, collections and more and synthesizing this into a cohesive profile.
Competency 1E anticipates that a professional will be familiar with "current types of library (school, public, academic, special, etc.) and closely related information agencies", and this project helped to familiarize me with public libraries in particular. In our coursework, we learned about different types of information institutions. After becoming familiar, for this assignment, we were required to identify a library that fit under one of the different types we had identified and write a thorough profile detailing many specific operations and other information. For my assignment, I chose to research the Fort Worth Public Library, a large public library with many branch locations. The central branch location also operates a historical archive, so the library actually functions as a special library as well. In a previous course I completed in the Spring of 2022, we focused exclusively on academic libraries, as well as the different types of academic libraries that exist. As such, I chose to focus on a public library for my library profile in order to familiarize myself with them. I reached out to staff to gain an understanding of existing policies, especially regarding collection development, as well as their typical budget, service area, actual user vs. potential user population and general history. As described in 1F of Competency 1, the professional should become aware of "social, public, information, economic, and cultural policies and trends of significance to the library and information science profession". I was able to gain an understanding of many of these factors in how they affected this library in particular, especially in changes to their demographic areas over time and their changes in policy due to COVID-19.