Here is Steph Nelson giving a guest lecture at the Fall 2006 HTML workshops on ePortfolios. Thanks Steph!
In the Spring of 2006 I began work with Steph Nelson at Kapi’olani Community College as the Electronic Resources Intern. After my previous internship with the Asia Collection at Hamilton Library, I was eager to dive into various different facets of librarianship, and Steph was more than happy to help with me whatever I wanted. We met early on and decided what the focus of the internship would be, what kinds of things I wanted to learn, and how we would spend time. I ended up coming to her office once a week to meet all day, and taking some other work home with me.
We did some early work with electronic resource management: Steph showed me what they had, how they organized the links to all the electronic journals, for example, and how they kept in touch with the vendors. We also sat at the reference desk and fielded questions. I started learning more about the job she did and how she got there. Steph was always very forthcoming about what she liked and didn’t like about her job and all about the life of an academic librarian at a community college. She answered my questions about librarianship and continues to be a great inspiration to me!
The biggest project we worked on was the complete redesign of the KCC website. It went from a white background basic-type site (Archived KCC Library Page (2005)), to being a fully-CSS-based user-friendly site with dynamic PHP navigation. We worked on the design for the entire Spring semester, and after Steph finalized that over the summer of 2006, I came back unofficially in the Fall of 2006 to help finish the project and work on the PHP navigation. Together, and with the help of her husband Chris, we were able to write new code to create the dynamic navigation that is in place today.
It was a great thing to be able to collaborate with Steph throughout the entire project, learn new web development skills (including programming, usability development, design, and more), and to create something that so many people use today. This experience continues to influence the projects I work on and will surely continue to be an asset to me in my professional career.
The next biggest project we worked on a project combining Microsoft Access and PHP / MySQL to set up a reference question database and portal. The reference interaction tabulation is something that is done by all the librarians at the reference desk – traditionally this has been kept track of on a piece of paper which the librarians check off after each interaction. We completely restyled this older model and created an interactive web-portal that the librarians can now use to login and input their interactions or comments. This project was less CSS-heavy and required more thought in terms of PHP and MySQL programming – which in retrospect was a good primer for the work we did on the website redesign.
One of the last projects I worked on during my official internship was working with Steph to enable OpenURL for KCC. We had to choose a vendor, negotiate a contract, setup the service and configure the databases and electronic portals. We also had to design how the OpenURL feature would interact with the existing electronic journals. It was an interesting project and one that I think will provide a good basis for future work in electronic resources.
My internship at KCC is really a foundational experience for the work I do today, and Steph Nelson continues to be my good friend and inspiration.