U12072402's INL370 Work Experience Learning Program

Day 9 - Sick I was sick during this day. Please refer to Ms Ball for my sick note.

Day 8 - Sick I was sick during this day. Please refer to Ms Ball for my sick note.

Day 7 - Information Science and Presentations. Today we learned more about what a information scientist is and what they have to do, we also learned about presentations and how to do research on a presentation topic. The day started out with us having a information session on what an information scientist is and what they do exactly. We where taught about the different roles an information scientist can have and the importance of joining a union, as it presents you with opportunities to network with other information scientist.  The morning session was pretty short, but the afternoon session would be a longer session and require more hands on work from our part. The afternoon session started out with us receiving a lecture on how to do presentations and how to gather information for those presentations. We where then divided into groups and each group was tasked with gathering information on a specific topic. We then had to compile the gathered information into a PowerPo

DAY 6 - Wikis and Social Networking. Today we looked at Wiki’s and Facebook and their relevance in the world of Information Sciences, we also had a brief tutorial on how to clean up data with open refine. The day started out with us meeting up with Isak at 9 AM in the library auditorium, he quickly explained to us the agenda for today. After that, we proceeded to go to the Natural science labs, where we will be working for the most of the week. When we reached the Natural science labs we started out with a quick ‘refresh’ lesson on what a wiki is and how they relate to information science. We learned that a lot of information scientists are tasked with keeping a wiki up to date and to make sure that the information contained in the wiki is correct. After the lecture, we were taught how to create and maintain a wiki, along with how to edit or contribute to another’s wiki and how to enable other people to edit or maintain our wiki. After wikis, we were given a quick l

Day 5 - Research Data Management Continued. Today we will continue looking at Research data management(RDM). We will go more in-depth than yesterday as we will be looking at the entire data life cycle, from start to finish. The day started out with a short introduction and agenda of the day. We then watched a short video on why data management is important and the different forms of data. After the video we wrote a short quiz about the video and data management. After we came back from our tea break we started by going through the generic research process and all of its steps. We were taught what the main role of a librarian is and how they manage data. “Bottom line … we (librarians) are in the ‘post-operative’ business! We take care of ‘data patients’ so that they can have a ‘long and useful research life’!” was the conclusion that was made on what librarians do. We also went through the Research Data Lifecycle, that can be seen above. We went through each of t

Day 4 - Research Data Management (RDM) Today we finished off with digitisation, mainly combining the digitised documents and combining them with Adobe Acrobat, and started out with Research Data Management. The day started out with us finishing off the clean-up processes that we were still busy with yesterday. After that we were taught the basics of Adobe Acrobat and how to combine multiple digitised documents into one PDF file. We then had to edit and change the bookmarks of the PDF to be accurate and informative as well as adding a watermark to the PDF. Lastly we used the OCR tool of Adobe Acrobat to scan through the pd in order to recognize the words and characters in the document. This aids in the restoration process by restoring the words to the file and changing it from a high quality picture to a PDF that contains actual text and words. This allows users of the newly digitised document to preform searches like they would on a normal PDF or word document. After lu

Day 3 - Digitization of  Analogue  and Physical Materials. Today we were taught about digitisation of analogue and physical materials and the importance there of. We were also taught how to do the digitisation and cleaning of the digitised images or documents ourselves. The day started out with a short lecture on what digitisation entails, why it is needed and used, and the whole process of digitisation from start to the finished product. After that we went down to the digitization centre of the library and shown how the different machines are used to scan in the different books, maps, paintings, etc. into a digital format that will be cleaned up at a later state. The clean-up process is very important as the scanned files can be discoloured or damaged due to old age and thus they have to be cleaned to make them reusable and legible. We were then taught how to do the clean-up process ourselves and tasked with cleaning up a bunch of files, one of those can be seen above.

Day 2 - Repositories. The main purpose of the day was to make sure we gain a good understanding on why repositories are used and how to correctly maintain and use them. The day started with a short lecture on why repositories are important for universities and libraries and how they are used and maintained by those institutions. We were notified that UP's Library manages most of the university's repositories and uploads to those repositories. This differs from universities like UNISA where it is the responsibility of the students and professors to upload their work to the related repositories. After the lecture we started with our training. We did multiple exercises on the different functionalities of a repository. We started with the basics, like how to navigate through the repository and submit articles to the repository and later did more advanced stuff, like setting up workflow's and creating templates. After that we were given two extra exercises where we

Day 1 - General Introduction and Meetings. T oday was the first day of the INL 370 Work Experience and Learning Program. It was mainly used for introductory purposes and explaining what the University's library actually does and some of the projects that they are currently working on.  T he day started off with the director of the Library, Mr Robert Maropa, explaining to us what the library is working towards and that their mission is to become a lean and agile, 21st century library. After his presentation we sat through a number of other presentations given by different team leaders and drivers from different departments of the library. They explained what they were currently working on and why their department was important to the main goal of the Library. We also sat through a presentation given by one of the members of the library's marketing team. She  explained  to us the importance of marketing for a library. The library  requires  a larger budget than their c