Introduction to my Project for Practicum

Student: Austen Esch

Supervisor: Shelley Barba

February 3, 2025, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.


My practicum supervisor, Mrs. Barba, takes a photo of me at my workstation. The workstation is a small room near her office.

I have been emailing with my practicum advisor, Shelley Barba, since December. However, I did not visually meet her until February, when we had a Zoom conversation. My job would be to clean up the subject headings used for documents to improve their searchability. My work for the practicum actually began on February 3 when I met with Mrs. Barba to discuss exactly what my responsibilities would be. She explained that I would be modifying the subject headings of Texas Tech students’ dissertations. I would need to become familiar with the standards for subject headings at Texas Tech. She informed me that the standards followed are based on Dublin Core (DC) and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). In order to effectively complete this task, I would need to become familiar with these two standards.

Mrs. Barba emailed me five documents discussing these topics and gave me access to a shared folder that housed a planner and two Excel documents. She told me I first needed to read these and become familiar with DC and LCSH; then, we could take a look at the Excel sheets. I thoroughly read over these documents and discovered the Library of Congress Subject Headings Cataloguing and Acquisitions web page among them. This would turn out to be a very important resource during my work. She then showed me the special way to open these specific Excel documents. We then investigated what they looked like. Mrs. Barba explained what the various headings were and scrolled until she found the section with the various subject heading columns. My job would be to take these columns and combine them all into one column that is labeled “dc.subject.lcsh” using the LCSH standards. I was very much overwhelmed, but I would continue studying all this until my next shift.


February 5, 2025, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

I am back at my workstation to discuss issues that I am having with working on the Excel documents. Mrs. Barba and I sat down together and discussed the issues and troubleshot solutions.

After experiencing my first day, I felt very overwhelmed, so I decided to continue reading from the resources that Mrs. Barba provided. I also began reading from other resources that I found from searching on Google. When I returned for my second shift, I was prepared to give it a try. However, I was unable to access the Excel files that I had received in my email. When we had taken a look at them earlier, it had been through Mrs. Barba’s computer and not mine. I had not yet tried to access them until now. The issue was that the only way to open the Excel sheets was to do it through a special process. This involves going into “Data” at the top of Excel, navigating to the left, and clicking on the ”From Text/CSV” option. This opens up your file explorer so you can find the Excel documents and open them. Mrs. Barba said this process was necessary because of how they had been created. However, my problem was that the documents were in a shared file which I could not access through the file explorer in Excel. I tried to download the shared file which only led to a black album being transformed. I then tried to download each individual Excel sheet, but the option to download was grayed out whenever I right-clicked them.

As a result, I had to call Mrs. Barba over to help me. She attempted the same things and a couple of different techniques but was also unable to download them. She then decided to email the Excel documents as attachments because the shared file seemed to be the culprit. It took quite a while to receive the email because of bad internet service at the Texas Tech Library, and I was on my personal computer using my iPhone’s hotspot for Wi-Fi. In the meantime, Mrs. Barba decided to demonstrate what I would be doing using her computer. Luckily, she could easily access the documents to demonstrate for me. Together, we went through and fixed the first listed dissertation subject heading. From this, I discovered how important the LCSH Cataloguing and Acquisitions website was. It gave a list of all the acceptable terms that could be in the subject heading. I will need to use it throughout the process. At this point I felt like I had a grasp of what I needed to do in order to fix these subject headings.

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