My ePortfolio
My name is Nichole Stinson, and I am currently an MLIS student at the University of Southern Mississippi, expecting to graduate in December 2025. I have a Master's of Economic Development from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Bachelor's Degree in Social Sciences from Troy University. For the last eight years, I have served as Director of the Thomasville Public Library. In 2023, we relocated and expanded our services to become the Thomasville Career Readiness Center, Public Library, and Museum. I absolutely love my community, my library, my staff, and my profession, and I have no intentions of leaving any time soon.
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Public libraries are a unique beast in that we are expected to be all things to all people. I truly believe that public libraries are the gap-filler in a community!
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My Blog
This blog, which was created for LIS 557, is not only my favorite assignment, but it is the assignment I am the most proud of! There are five blog posts created last summer where I share bits and pieces of my library such as how I moved my library from a 4,400 square foot outdated building to a 17,100 historic masterpiece, our annual Barbie Party and Harry Potter Book Day events, why we have a Career Readiness Center in our library, as well as highlighting my favorite historical relic in the building - an original Linotype Machine.
This assignment was not only one that I could immediately use in promoting my library, but it sparked a fire in me to tell the story of my library and my community through blog posts. Throughout the MLIS program at USM, it has been reiterated just how important it is for those in library leadership to advocate for our libraries. Regularly updated blogs are an excellent way to not only talk about what activities are going on at the library, but are a relatively easy way to justify your worth and dedication to your community in an informal manner. This assignment also served as practice for writing about my library, which is something every library director and those in leadership should be able to do well.
Multimedia Assignments
This library tour video was an assignment for LIS 500. It was excellent practice for filming and creating videos that showcased not only my facility, but programs and events, as well. Marketing your library and its services is a large part of what I do, and I immediately used the skills I learned during this assignment in my current job.
This Cricut Design Space Tutorial for LIS 557 was a fun and challenging assignment. I have recorded tutorials for YouTube but I have never done anything quite like this. Part of working in information science is the promotion of lifelong learning and having the ability to create my own tutorials for my library is something that I will continue to use for years to come.
Scholarly Projects
In LIS 511, we were given a group assignment to complete a Collection Development Policy. This was during my first semester of the MLIS program in the Spring of 2024, and this assignment unknowingly taught me important information and skills that would become useful a few months later when the State of Alabama changed our legal code to require individual policy changes regarding children, as well as sexually explicit materials in public libraries, to receive State Aid funding. I cannot tell you the number of times I referenced the notes, readings, and this assignment when working on my library's policy updates.
Another assignment in this MLIS program that I immediately found useful for my job as Library Director was the LIS 511 Weeding Project. While the project was meant to be hypothetical, I took it as an opportunity to weed and update my most neglected section of my library, Biographies. Not only did I learn about weeding strategies, I used the knowledge gained from this class and project to develop a game plan for continually weeding my library so that no section becomes as neglected and untouched as Biographies.