The Indigenous Heritage Collection of Alameda County’s objective is to build a digital collection archiving, digitizing, documenting, and housing cultural and historical materials and artifacts from the Muwekma Ohlone Indigenous Tribe using appropriate tribal and community protocol for sharing utilizing Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS). This collection is being developed to preserve the tribe’s history and culture, giving birth to their story while giving others the ability to learn and have access to it.
I learned about Mukurtu (CMS) last semester in my INFO202 class with Professor Allison Johnson. She showed us a video showcasing the creator of the program. The video really stayed with me and when it came time for this project, I decided to utilize this “Emerging Technology” for it.
I decided to focus on my local library system (Alameda County Library) and the local Indigenous Tribe (Muwekma Ohlone Indigenous Tribe) because it felt like a project that had special meaning to me because I grew up here and because my mom’s life’s work is in this field. I spent my early years (and much of my life) exposed to the stories and culture of Native California Indigenous People, so this project seems very apropos.
In the lecture video for the Module “Infinite Learning: Library as a Class,” Dr. Michael Stephens talks about how some libraries are offering classes on topics pertaining to life literacy—what we need to do to live/exist and “adulting 101.”
I gravitated to this topic because I’ve always felt an appeal to this term and I always say that I feel like I am “playing” at being an adult and one day everyone’s going to find that out (even though I am married, have two kids, own a house and car, etc…). I guess you can call it a bit of an “imposter syndrome.” This made me want to do some research on this topic.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “adulting” as, “the act or practice of attending to the ordinary tasks required of a responsible adult” and Dictionary.com defines it as “an informal term to describe behavior that is seen as responsible and grown-up. This behavior often involves meeting the mundane demands of independent and professional living, such as paying bills and running errands.”
Basically, this term is widely used among millennials and has been a trendy slang word. But, it really does fit for a generation of people that don’t feel like they’ve grown up. When I look up “adulting” and “adulting 101”a plethora of self-help books, workbooks, webpages (many of them universities), classes, podcasts, social media come up. Here is a sampling of offerings on the topic:
“If you graduated from college but still feel like a student . . . if you wear a business suit to job interviews but pajamas to the grocery store . . . if you have your own apartment but no idea how to cook or clean . . . it’s OK. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Just because you don’t feel like an adult doesn’t mean you can’t act like one.”
“Adulting 101 Book 2: #liveyourbestlife is a personal growth book that provides you with a clear vision of what a healthy adult looks like, equips you with the necessary tools to begin a meaningful adulthood, and offers critical resources to fulfill your purpose.”
Film by Eleanor Blake and Nich Perez, Directed by Dominique Sheth
“ADULTING is a short documentary that follows the lives of three millennials and their unique journeys into adulthood in a society that questions their generation’s capacity to be responsible and mature.”
Eleanor Blake, Nich Perez, & University of Southern California,School of Cinematic Arts (Producers), & Sheth, D. (Director). (2018). Adulting. [Video/DVD] University of Southern California. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/Adulting
Burnette, J., & Hardesty, P. (2021). Adulting 101 Book 2: #LiveYourBestLife: An in-depth guide to developing healthy habits, becoming more confident, and living your purpose for graduates and young adults. Goodreads. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55065193-adulting-101-book-2
Sheth, D. (Director). (2018). ADULTING | (2018) Trailer [Video]. Vimeo. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from https://vimeo.com/251062399
My son in Half Moon Bay. [Personal Photo by Laurel Everitt]It is currently Spring Break for myself and my school aged children. The other day, we decided to take a day trip to Half Moon Bay, CA to visit the beach. My mom came along too. My family has a long history in relation to Half Moon Bay. My paternal grandparents have a house in the area that we would periodically visit throughout my childhood. I have so many vivid memories from this area, the beach, the pier, and the house. When we come back to Half Moon Bay it’s filled with revisiting old restaurants and bakeries, doing the things we always have done when we visit, and talking about the stories that took place here (during my time and even before me). I feel a little closer to the family members that are no longer here, and it is little like stepping back in time. Most of the stories we remember when we visit Half Moon Bay are happy and usually make us laugh. By bringing my children to this place that has been a part of my personal story, I get to share it with them too along with building new stories and memories.
My daughter making a sand angel. [Personal Photo by Laurel Everitt]Stories connect us all, because at core we all have the same wants, needs, sorrows, and happiness. In the Module 10: The Power of Stories Lecture, Dr. Michael Stephens asks us to close our eyes and remember ourself as a child in the summer and envision what that looked like (Stephens, n.d.). Everyone has this kind of experience – we all were children once, we all lived during a summer as one—there will be many similarities, but everyone has their own individual plot line. The similarities are what make connections between people. I think it is why I want my own children to get to experience some of the same things I did when I was their age—that connection.
While making my way through Model 9: New Horizons, I read the assigned reading article, Growing up with Alexa: A child’s relationship with Amazon’s voice assistant By Samantha Murphy Kelly. Around the same time, I had come across some posts on social media that really resonated with me in my time of life. I am in my late 30’s, am married, I have school aged children, and I am finally coming out of the fog of being a stay-at-home mom to babies and then small children. During that time I lived in a bubble and somewhat lost touch with some things. Even with that, I often find myself feeling as if I am “playing” at an adult and not realizing the extent of change with today’s younger adults/teens.
The article mentioned above talks about how when babies/toddlers are learning to talk, they are learning the name “Alexa” as one of their first words because of the prevalence of repetition of the word with use of the Amazon Echo. Before reading the article I had come across the “Then vs. Now” challenge on social media. Where millennial moms and Gen Z. teens compare how they would hand gesture such things as “picking up a phone” and “rolling down a car window.” (See video #1 below). In another post I had come across, a millennial mom talks about how popular millennial names are “old people names.”(See video #2 below).
Video #1: (Click on screen shot for video — couldn’t embed)
These three things really hit home to me about the changes in the world and how I and people my age as a whole need to change the way we think and do things. We are not where the future is going, we are the current, but we need to work towards changing things for the future of our children. This comes into play with the need of change in the library, how libraries do things, and the changes and “new horizons” coming to the library world. We and the libraries we are going to be a part of need to start adapting and being open—to technology, how things are run, and our offerings for our public’s evolving needs.
livingwithlady. (2024, January 15). It’s like two velociraptors. . .🫶 Any we missed?! Do this with someone from another generation and compare answers; did you get any the same?! [Video]. Instagram. Retrieved March 23, 2024, from https://www.instagram.com/livingwithlady/reel/C2JFPJZpBa0/
For the Innovation Strategy & Roadmap assignment I created a fictional program at my local library in Fremont, CA that is a Community Garden/Checkout-a-Plot program.
My informational slide show on Canva can be viewed here:
For Module 6 – Hyperlinked Environments & Issues we got to “choose our own adventure” to learn more about a specific topic. I purposely chose to focus my studies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGTP because I have made a consorted effort to avoid these things in the past because they make me feel uncomfortable. I figured it would be best to “bite the bullet” and start learning more about it!
I think the reason I have avoided these two things is that I am avoiding change, and I also don’t like to jump on board with the popular “thing.” It’s more about being stubborn than anything. I am also very skeptical about this technology and the abuse of it in the educational world. But the logically thinking and reasoning person inside of me knows I need to get over this and adapt it to my world. This module was a great excuse to do this. This was definitely not the “safe” and “easy” topic choice for me!
Today I was struggling with understanding a topic and assignment for a certain class, so I finally gave in and asked ChatGTP about it. It actually helped me better understand the topic and I then had more skills to find the answers I needed within the class text and lectures. This gave me a real-life experience on how this technology can be a great tool, if used wisely.
A lot of what I have done for the first part of my week for school has revolved around doing the reading for “Module 5: Hyperlinked Community” and starting to do research for my final research paper topic for my “INFO285-Historical Research Methods” class. My tentative topic is The WPA Pack Horse Library Project which took place during the Great Depression. The Pack Horse Library Project was started to give access to books to people living in the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky. Most of these places were only reachable by horseback and so this program began to connect this isolated community to the rest of the world and each other (Pack Horse Library Project, 2024)!
The librarians would bring books, but they also created scrapbooks that included things like sewing patterns and recipes. The items for these scrapbooks would sometimes be contributed by members of the community or from findings by the librarian. People would then check these scrapbooks out. This was just a small portion of what the Pack Horse Librarian did (Vance, 2012).
The reason I brought this up was the connection I could see between this time in history and what is being delved into by this class. The Pack Horse Librarian was creating her own “Hyperlinked Community.” Before technology, communities found alternate ways to connect and interact. Throughout history, the library and the librarian have adapted to their communities needs and gave connection to people that might not have had it otherwise. That is a pretty amazing thing…
Vance, J. (2012). Librarians as authors, editors, and self-publishers: The information culture of the Kentucky Pack Horse Library scrapbooks (1936–1943). Library & Information History, 28(4), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1179/1758348912z.00000000020
“Self-service libraries provide a quiet, round-the-clock reading space for their users and have transformed libraries’ service model from one of ‘users waiting for library services’ to one of ‘library waiting to service users’” (Zhang, Y. et al., 2022).
“Staff-less library”/ “self-service library” / “unmanned library” there are many different names to identify libraries that now offer self-service hours that let patron access a library after normal service hours. This comes in a couple different forms: The first is access using your library card to the whole library after hours and the second is kiosks that let you do limited library tasks. This has been a service in many European and Asian countries for a long time. This is a new endeavor for libraries in the United States. The first library testing out this service in the US was Gwinnett County Public Library (a part of suburban Atlanta, GA) in 2016 and since then (and especially influenced by the pandemic) more and more libraries across the country are implementing this new service (Bibliotheca, 2021).
Check out this video from Gwinnett County Public Libraries about their experience with this program:
This program is often controversial because some community members are worried about safety for staff and patrons in an empty building. Last year, there was a fight in a Canadian Library when the library was pushing to implement this offering. Some of the negative viewpoints are of the possible reduction of jobs/job security and safety issues mentioned above (Fullerton, 2023). Many libraries that have implemented these programs claim that it is not to reduce employees or open hours, but to create more access for patrons at a lower cost. Time will tell how this will ultimately impact library employees.
Locally, in Woodland, CA at Woodland Library (which is part of the Santa Clara County Library District), they are offering after-hours access using “Open+” in a service called “Open Access”. Woodland Library is the smallest branch in the district, and the only one with limited hours. This gives their community more access to the library (Morgan 2024). Another local library is testing out this service at the Village Square Branch Library of the San Jose Public Library in San Jose, CA (Open+ Library Access, n.d.).
“Open+” from the company called Bibliotheca is the service used widely for this library feature. “Open+” and Bibliotheca offer software, hardware, and physical setup assistance to implement the self-service features for libraries. There is a larger up-front cost, but yearly it is substantially more cost effective then increasing regular staffed open hours of the library (Bibliotheca, 2018; Hendra, 2021).
Check out this video from Bibliotheca on how “Open+” works:
As a future information professional, I think that having this alternate access for patrons is amazing! It feels like the “future” to be able to use self-service capabilities and visit the library with no physical monitoring. Rather than have very limited hours this feature gives patron’s access to books, technology, and a safe space more extensively. This seems like it should put less stress on staff during open hours and incentivize more people to utilize the library who previously could not make the open hours. This is about listening and accommodating the local population’s needs.
Zhang, Y., Chiu, D. K. W., Jiang, T., & Ho, K. K. W. (2022). Patrons’ satisfaction with self-service public libraries: A demographic study. Library Quarterly, 92(2), 188–206. https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1086/718604
Hello! My name is Laurel and I reside in the East SF Bay Area where I live with my two children (Lorelai, aged eight and Desmond, aged five), my husband, a miniature poodle named Gus, and two kittens that have adopted my family (they were abandoned in my backyard by their feral mother as tiny babies) and have now made their way to living in our house. 🙂 I am currently a stay-at-home mom in my second semester as San Jose State University working on my Master of Library and Information Science.In my previous life I worked in the fashion industry and have degrees in Fashion Merchandising Management and Fashion Design. I went to school and worked in New York City before relocating back to the Bay Area to start my “own thing.” I got a bit disillusioned by the New York fashion industry. I then started my own online plus size vintage shop and blog, which I ran full time for many years. I acted as buyer, clothing designer, model, webpage and graphic designer, blogger, and shop manager. if you would like to check them out: The Curvy Elle Shop and The Curvy Elle Blog. After having children, my business has gone to the wayside and is now more of a “hobby.” I am excited to start this new career path!
In my previous life I worked in the fashion industry and have degrees in Fashion Merchandising Management and Fashion Design. I went to school and worked in New York City before relocating back to the Bay Area to start my “own thing.” I got a bit disillusioned by the New York fashion industry. I then started my own online plus size vintage shop and blog, which I ran full time for many years. I acted as buyer, clothing designer, model, webpage and graphic designer, blogger, and shop manager. if you would like to check them out: