PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOME 2

Understand, engage, and serve users and their communities.

Program Learning Outcome 2 is deeply aligned with both my personal values and professional goals as an emerging information professional. To me, this outcome represents the essential responsibility we have to listen to and uplift the voices of those we serve, ensuring our work is not only technically proficient but also inclusive, just, and grounded in real community needs. Whether I am developing workflows for art conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designing oral history projects that preserve institutional memory, or exploring sustainable access solutions through cloud technologies, my focus is on building trust, seeking feedback, and remaining adaptable. This PLO has pushed me to think more critically about power dynamics, representation, and accessibility in every aspect of my work. It has encouraged me to see users not as passive recipients of information but as collaborators and co-creators in a shared knowledge ecosystem. In the following sections, I reflect on how my academic and professional experiences have helped me embody this PLO and prepare me to serve a wide range of users with intention, care, and cultural competence.

2.1 Assess the needs and goals of users and communities.

In order to keep up with the constantly changing needs of the community I request anonymous feedback on various projects or areas of work in my special collection. This allows me to tailor the technology and accessibility of our collections to that of the current standards and the needs of the users. Something that I have employed in my work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is frequent beta-testing of technology, software, and workflows. This allows me to engage with users (in my case art conservators), who have a different educational and work background than me, as well as having a niche set of skills that I do not. This means that it would be unjust or ineffective for me to just purchase technology or software or create workflows and just say this is how things are now. It is vital for my staff to test these things out and help me adjust and tailor the devices or softwares to their specific needs based on their own experience. This is also a vital skill in my work as technology, and data standards adapt and evolve over time. These are areas that are always changing. This means that terminology used by art conservators may change, and I need to be made aware in order for me to update our metadata standards and file naming conventions just to name a few examples.

2.2 Engage diverse users and communities with empathy and cultural competence.

To make sure we reach all members of our community we must make our collections accessible through various end points, as well as inclusive of any and all identity groups of our community. This can mean having the link to our online collections available through the local library or even through collecting material that relates to underrepresented members of our community. An example of this work can be seen in my IST 717 Library Leader Interview. I was able to interview a mentor of mine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Janine Biunno, the Archives Manager of the institution. She has become a vital source for me as a more junior information professional, not just on archives and information standards, but also for working with diverse users and with cultural competence. This comes in the form of learning how to respond to different research requests from the public, internal staff, academic researchers, and students.

2.3 Elicit the voices of, advocate for, and collaborate with users as community partners in the provision of information resources and services.

Through feedback from the community, we can generate ideas for who is less represented by our collections and discover what the community wants our holdings to contain and what gaps in existing records need to be filled. This can also include oral history projects of staff and patrons of the institution I am working at in order to provide a glimpse of the experiences of all people. When I was working at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I was able to work on editing transcripts for their oral history project of emeritus staff of the museum. This project was vital in telling the history of the institution and how it worked internally for many decades. Through this experience, I was able to institute a similar project at the Met, specifically in the conservation department that I work in now, to be able to create oral history interviews of emeritus staff that know the ins and outs of the Met from the latter half of the 20th century, a history that without a project like this could be lost. Through these experiences, I hope to continue to elicit the voices of and collaborate with users as community partners in the institutions that I work in.

2.4 Provide equitable, just, and culturally responsive services and resources.

Our institution must be transparent to staff and patrons about problematic histories related to collecting and looting, in order to remain culturally responsive. This can include blog posts on the website about looted art discovered in the collection, and personal stories about the staff who help to uncover the provenance of art objects in our holdings. An example of this work came from the research paper I did in IST 615: Cloud Management, Next Generation Cloud Technologies, where I chose to focus on Green Cloud initiatives. This was a topic of interest to me, because cloud technologies can be very energy inefficient and use many unsustainable resources. The unfortunate thing is that cloud technologies can provide access to people and institutions information all over the world. Through this research I found that there are companies working to create net zero cloud products that would be just and culturally responsive to a cleaner planet but also a more accessible information infrastructure.

2.5 Use educational theory, instructional design, and assessment to develop, implement, and evaluate education, training, and programming for a variety of learner audiences.

In order to keep our staff informed on how to search through records related to art objects with possibly questionable provenance, we can provide trainings on case studies of recently restituted art. This program can be constantly updated as more objects are restituted to different countries, hopefully eventually developing a guide for staff to use on a daily basis. In my current position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I have created a guide for staff to use when working on objects that have been made of organic materials, as they require additional research and permitting to be able to be loaned internationally. This has led to trainings from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to our staff to help staff understand the constantly evolving landscape of international trade laws more digestible to museum employees (this includes registrars, legal counsel, collections managers, and conservators) whose work directly relates to this information.

Discussion of Learning Transfer:

From these experiences, I have learned that in order to achieve outcomes related to understanding, engaging and serving users and their communities, it is important to request and receive constant feedback in many forms. I have worked with focus groups, surveys, and one on one conversations with key users in my current and past work and expect to continue this practice. Further, it is imperative to learn what my users need as their work evolves, as well as when the technology available evolves. This means that if I ever catch myself not garnering feedback for any new standards or devices, I am not serving my users to the fullest. This also means attending conferences and participating in professional organizations that communicate updates to standards, tech, and techniques to best reach users and gain their feedback.