Greetings, APALA community! My name is Dawn K. Wing. I am the Information Services and Instruction Teaching Assistant at Media, Education Resources, Information Technology (MERIT) Library at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). I am currently finishing up my last year of graduate school at UW-Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) and anticipate receiving my MLIS in May 2013. My focus is reference and instruction, particularly outreach, instructional design and online learning.
Time certainly does fly by. I am glad I joined APALA during my first year of school. I will never forget the warm welcome from members and eating copious amounts of food at the APALA Social held at a local Chinese seafood restaurant during the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA this past June. It was a pleasure to finally match faces to familiar names.
Also, I am honored to be a part of APALA as a member of the newsletter committee and web content subcommittee. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about APA issues in LIS and highlight the achievements of APA library leaders and writers under the supportive direction of APALA committee leaders like Gerardo Colmenar and Melissa Cardenas-Dow. A piece I am proud to share with the APALA community is an interview with 2009 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award winner and cartoonist Lynda Barry. Taking Ms. Barry’s creative writing course at UW-Madison was one of the most exciting, moving experiences in my life. I am also privileged to support the “What’s Your Normal?” series and am touched by the inspiring stories APALA members are contributing.
An interesting project I am working on in my current position is second language collection development at MERIT Library. Collaborating with my peers, I hope to increase the number of bilingual picture books in Arabic, Hmong, Chinese, and Spanish so that current and future K-12 teachers can provide engaging literature that will help English Language Learners in the classroom. I am fortunate to work with a colleague who previously worked for the Hmong Archives in St. Paul, Minnesota and is contributing her knowledge of Hmong resources to this collection development endeavor.
In addition to collection development, I also enjoy teaching new educational technology to pre-service K-12 teachers at UW-Madison. Having had fun web conferencing experiences with Google+ Hangout, first introduced to me by Melissa Cardenas-Dow, I am now an avid promoter of Google Apps and its potential for collaborative, online learning. Please check out other LIS projects I’ve worked on by visiting my e-portfolio at http://madslisdawn.wordpress.com.