The Inspiration Report highlights a technology-enhanced service or trend and provides background, context, application, and pros/cons. Your audience is a library director or administrative team. 
Description
The Inspiration Report gives you the opportunity to hone in on a technology-enhanced service or a trend in participatory libraries from course content or lectures or in conversations with your peers. Situated as a report-of-sorts for a library director or administrative team, you’ll be crafting a brief that informs your administrator of its origins, related terminologies, application in LIS environments, and addresses both positive and negative aspects. This will be your most polished, detailed, and well-presented work of the semester.
You will write a Inspiration Report on ONE of the following FOUR options:
- Tech & Trends: Create an examination of an emerging technology or participatory trend of your choice. Your brief may be designed to introduce a new technology to your library director, or to suggest enhancements to a participatory service already in place at your library.
- Global Library Trends: Create an examination of progressive library services, trends or models outside of the US related to our course themes. What can we learn from these global initiatives? Your brief may be designed to introduce these international concepts to your library director or admin team. This offers a chance to create an artifact for Comp O.
- The Power of Stories: Create a project, plan, or idea that captures the power of stories for librarians, patrons, and/or communities. Your report may be designed to introduce a storytelling-inspired proposal to your library director or admin team.
- Infinite Learning: Create a participatory learning program tailored for a library or libraries. Be sure to make a conscious choice of audience, do you want this to be a learning experience for users or staff. Since this has an emphasis on infinite learning, consider ways for the program to evolve. How can it be built upon in the future? In what ways could the library continue to support independent learners who wish to expand upon what they learned in your program?
Craft the report as though you are sending it to your library director, a technology planning group, or the recipient of your choice (to fit your career goals). Be creative! Use design elements and formatting, images, hyperlinks, and more to enhance the work.
Requirements
- The report should be structured in logical fashion and should be inspired by this template. Use headings to organize your report and guide the reader. The report should contain succinct, clear writing.
- Examine professional and scholarly articles and cite them to build your “case” for the technology or trend. References should also include course content with appropriate synthesis connecting those references to the external sources you find.
- Include graphic elements, media, and/or screenshots in a way that enhances your report.
- The final product should be polished and professional with a thoughtful design and layout.
- The report should be between 1500-2000 words. Use a consistent citation style as well.
Inspirational Examples
Please review examples to see how previous students have creatively approached the Inspiration Report assignment at the Assignment Inspiration Page.
Posting & Submission
- Publish the report as a PDF (or other media-based artifact) and share it via a post on your blog. In that post, introduce the report with a few sentences or a paragraph or two from your introduction and link the PDF/artifact. Be as creative as you’d like with the product.
- As a final step, submit your post URL to our Canvas site.
NOTE: This is not a blog post. This is a creative artifact linked in a blog post.
Grading
| Criteria | Points |
| Required components | 6 |
| Connections to course content | 6 |
| Comprehension and analysis | 6 |
| Progression of thought and reflection | 6 |
| Overall presentation | 6 |
| TOTAL | 30 |
See full rubric here.