ABOUT
Thank you for visiting and welcome. My name is Holly Jones and I am currently finishing up my last class in the Master of Library and Information Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I received my undergraduate degree at UNCG and went right to work in the social services field. After almost two decades, I was ready for a change. I homeschooled my children for several years and thought I wanted to pursue an education career and entered the graduate program at Salem College, but I did not finish the program. During my time homeschooling I had the unique opportunity to co-found and co-direct a STEM homeschool coop. This experience sparked an interest in teaching STEM concepts, reinforced my love for learning and teaching and helped put me on the path toward librarianship. Once my children entered public high school, I found myself ready to try out the library profession so I began volunteering at my local library. I enjoyed it and applied for the MLIS program to learn as much about the profession as possible. When I started the program, I also began working part time at a local Public Library in the Children's Department.
Librarians are unique because the profession requires expertise in social work, education and technology. This blend appeals to me because it requires continual learning, adapting and innovation. Helping others and sharing my enthusiasm for STEM has become a central focus while I have been working at the public library. I try to incorporate all of the elements
of STEM in each program that I do to help make it more hands-on and educational. Also, by providing additional challenges and experiences, the program content will appeal to a broader range of children with different learning modalities and abilities.
Virtual Communities
Personal Experiences
My first virtual experience was through different chat rooms when the internet just started up. I started a Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Ancestry account. Initially, all of these platforms were interesting, but did not hold my interest due to lack of time. The one exception to this was my research and work on Ancestry. A family member had been interested in looking for their biological family and I quickly found myself working for days doing research. I like Ancestry because there is a return for your time investment whereas I never really felt a positive payoff on any of the other social media platforms. I love the ability to find and talk with new family members that match my DNA results. I usually ask newly found family members if we can share our family trees so that I can fill in the blanks of my tree since there are so many gaps.
Work Experiences
When I first started the STEM homeschool coop, my partner and I used Facebook and I built a website to market and process registrations. We also cross posted throughout many local homeschool online communities and yahoo groups. When I started working for the Public Library, I began making online posts to use for program promotion or to spread awareness of resources that I thought parents might find interesting or helpful. That was the extent of my interaction with posting on social media up until we had to close our doors to the public in March. Since then, I have created almost 20 videos for our department. I am also hosting Zoom meetings to collaborate with other community groups on virtual projects I have in the works. Now that we have our own Children's Department private Facebook page, my social media interactions have increased dramatically. Now I am interacting with patrons directly and posting on a weekly basis.
